


Autonomy

by A_Diamond



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Police, Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Body Modification, Cyborg(ish) Cas, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Side Characters in Someone Else’s Dystopian YA Novel, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 15:17:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16390148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: Dean had his share of difficult sentinel partners at his underfunded, overworked police department in Kansas. When he gets a position on a national investigation team in D.C., he’s not expecting the biggest challenge of his career to be his new partner. A sentinel who thinks his cybernetic augmentations render guides like Dean unnecessary, Cas proves every bit as difficult to pin down as their first case together: a hunt through suburbs, slums, and the vast virtual landscape in search of a missing prodigy whose technology could bring down governments—or make them invincible.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Winter_of_our_Discontent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winter_of_our_Discontent/gifts).



> This DCBB fic is also a Fandom Trumps Hate auction fic that owes so much of its creation to its bidder, [Winter_of_our_Discontent](http://bamfinacuddlyjumper.tumblr.com/). Thank you for bidding on me and providing great inspiration, and also for letting me run wild with it!
> 
> Amazing art by telltaleofthestars, masterpost (with potential spoilers) [here](https://telltaleofthestars.tumblr.com/post/179361763391/the-dcbb-art-master-post-its-been-wonderful). Thanks as always to the astonishingly patient superhoney for dealing with my disaster drafts, to knife chat for their knives and support, and to jojo and muse for being the best mods a bang could hope for.

Dean adjusted his belt for the hundredth time, testing that his gun, restraint filaments, and plastimetal cuffs were right where he would reach for them. He wasn’t used to plainclothes assignments; even when he’d been partnered with detective sentinels in the past, he’d still been a uniformed officer. Armored jumpsuit, full duty belt with bio-locked magnetic releases, and a heavy helmet with a dark visor covering his face. With National Enforcement and Investigation, working as an agent on an investigations team, he’d be in a nice shirt and slacks most days. Maybe even a jacket.

It was going to take some getting used to. Back in Kansas, leaving the building out of uniform without at least a ballistic vest was asking to get shot, tranqed, or hit with a homing knife. Helmets were as good as mandatory for the same reason. Anyone who didn’t live in the barracks—and most people did, including Dean—stayed suited up until the armor-plated convoy carried them into the secret tunnels from which they could emerge unnoticed.

But D.C. prided itself on being clean and safe: no weapons, no gangs, no drugs. The Enforcement side of NEI went to great lengths to keep it that way—aggressively scanning every plane, car, bus, person, and package that entered the city; firewalls and alarms on matter printers that tried to produce anything questionable; no-knock warrants for raids on “randomly selected” residences that only ever hit the few remaining non-governmental housing blocks.

And all of that so that Dean and the rest of Investigations, but more importantly the privileged and sequestered politicos running the country, could walk around freely. He didn’t even have to wear anti-scanning bands to keep his chips from being cloned.

That made him feel more exposed than any of the rest of it, but proved to be practical if nothing else. He’d had to scan in what felt like a hundred times. A normal scan to open the building doors, then both wrist chips in front of the agent controlling passage through the lobby, then to get into the elevator, and another time just to select a floor. When it chimed its arrival on the fourth floor, it did so without opening; the scanner panel pulsed a cascading circle of red lights, demanding he scan yet again to get out.

“Really?” he asked the unresponsive elevator. “This doesn’t strike you as the least bit overboard?”

He passed the inside of his right wrist in front of the scanner, rolling his eyes, and it faded to green as the door slid away. A man stood on the other side—or something resembling a man. He looked more like an early-generation android, from before companies had started trying to make them more realistically human in appearance. But he was more flesh than plastimetal, and the parts of him that were flesh didn’t have the waxy smoothness of rudimentary synskin.

Still, if he was human, he was the most heavily modded human Dean had ever seen. And he’d busted an illegal chop shop that specialized in turning desperate young men and women into robot fetish wet dreams—for about six months, until the combination of hack-job surgeries, dirty drugs, and abuse killed them. Then their parts were cannibalized for the next round of victims.

The augmentations facing Dean were geared toward practicality rather than aesthetic, though; which made sense, since he was at NEI and not a sketchy, neon-lit brothel. Tubes and wires veined the man’s arms and neck, telltale marks of skeletomuscular enhancement—more numerous and densely packed than Dean had even thought was possible. Inky oil and acidic blue coolant pulsed through the tubes as Dean watched, though the man didn’t move at all. Both his eyes had been replaced with piercingly bright implants that stared without blinking as Dean took him in.

“No,” he answered the question he shouldn’t have been able to hear, “we don’t consider our routine physical security measures to be overboard.”

His eyes—just his eyes, something about the digital-bright irises made it seem like they were doing it independent of the rest of him—gave Dean a quick but doubtless thorough once-over. “This way, please, Agent Winchester.”

Dean took half a step in his direction, biting his tongue on asking for an introduction. It would only be fair, since the man clearly knew who he was, but he knew as well as anyone that life wasn’t fair. His line of work, his experience, maybe he knew that better than most—and he also knew not to expect basic courtesy from sentinels most of the time. There were always exceptions, of course, but they tended to be a standoffish bunch. Maybe it was because their brains were too busy processing all the additional sensory input to have any room for feelings.

By and large, sentinels were dicks. He didn’t know for sure that the guy was a sentinel, but chances were decent. NEI had a higher percentage of sentinel agents than the population average; even higher than the per capita on paraesthetics overall. The eye implants weren’t a definite giveaway, since they could’ve just been standard vision, but anything above that would be impossible for a regular human to process without overloading. Ditto for the enhanced hearing—either it was a natural sentinel trait or an augmentation that risked overwhelming non-sentinel senses.

Or maybe Dean’s initial speculation had been right after all, and the guy wasn’t a guy but a highly specialized—and probably experimental—android of some kind. He’d find out sooner or later, though he suspected he’d have to wait at least until someone else got involved, since his current host wasn’t offering up any information.

As the man turned, Dean caught an odd lump pushing at the back of his jacket. He cycled idly through possibilities—power source or unusual mod being the most likely—but didn’t worry about it too much. He was even less likely to find out what it was at the moment than he was to get basic answers about who he was following. Hopefully not his new partner, though it was possible. He hadn’t gotten a lot of straight answers about the members of his new team out of the agent who handled his recruitment and testing; there was at least one sentinel, since they wanted a guide on the team, but that was as far as his knowledge went.

At the end of a long hallway, they reached an opaque blue and gray door marked CyberScape Investigations and the man scanned his wrist. Then he turned to Dean expectantly, even though the pad flashed green and the door slid open. He even stood in the way of Dean going through it in a way that seemed calculated to appear unintentional but obviously wasn’t. Physical security measures were one thing, even if they were extreme. At some point it had to cross the line into hazing the new guy, but he couldn’t tell anything from the blank face and inorganic eyes in front of him.

“Are you serious?”

“It’s protocol for every member of the team to scan in upon arrival and scan out upon departure. It records your presence not just for accountability, but for your own safety in case you need to be located in an emergency.” The explanation was grave and monotone, every single aspect of it boring enough to make Dean wonder if he’d made the wrong decision signing up, if he’d gotten himself into a place where he would be miserable.

Then, in exactly the same tone and without twitching his neutral expression, the man added, “This, universally, we consider at least a little bit overboard.”

So the cyborg had a personality after all. Dean could work with deadpan, as long as there was something underneath it. “I dunno,” he said with a smirk, “that seems entirely reasonable to me.”

He walked over and waved his chip at the reader, making it flash green again, then raised his eyebrows exaggeratedly at his guide. The man’s mouth might’ve twitched, but it also might’ve been a trick of the light as he nodded. Leading Dean through the door, he said, “We have a team meeting every Tuesday; debrief anything significant from the past week, review and assign new cases. It’s also the only day everyone is here since we have staggered schedules. Supervisor Cuevas wanted to bring you in for that first.”

“Bring me in for introductions, or bring me in to jump right into it in the hot seat on my first day?”

The man stopped and looked back at Dean, his cybernetic eyes bright as they flashed over Dean again. Were they scanning him, checking his vitals, analyzing him for minute reactions? The rest of the man’s face gave nothing away. “Yes,” he said, then resumed walking.

Dean could hear raised voices before they reached the turn that brought the team into view. The man must’ve heard it before then, but he didn’t look surprised or concerned—for whatever that was worth. Once Dean could see the people involved and make out some of the words, it made sense; the redheaded woman was yelling something about variable power sources and a man whose shaggy mullet and half-shaved scruff couldn’t possibly fit under NEI’s dress code was brandishing some sort of three-branched cable at her and extolling its virtues. They were messing around, light-hearted and friendly, and Dean relaxed at it. Between that easy camaraderie and the momentary flash of humor from his cyborg companion, he was starting to feel hopeful that he’d fit on his new team.

The two arguing were too caught up in it to notice the new arrivals, but another man and woman sitting at the table looked up as Dean and the other man approached. She scrutinized him with narrow eyes that were almost as piercing and as unreadable as the implants; he smiled and nodded briefly, then set down the tablet in his hand and stood. His movement stopped the debate and suddenly Dean had all four people staring at him, but he didn’t get a chance to feel awkward about it before the man walked over with his hand outstretched.

“Welcome to the team. I’m Cesar Cuevas.”

“Dean Winchester,” he answered. Cesar’s hand was warm and dry, his grip firm. “Thanks for giving me this opportunity, I won’t let you down.”

“I’m sure you won’t. Now, I do want to throw you right in, but we can at least introduce the rest of the team before we get to cases. You’ve met Cas—”

Dean couldn’t help it; he laughed. Looking surprised, Cesar stopped talking, but before he could apologize for his rudeness, the woman who had been arguing interjected with an exasperated laugh of her own.

“Again? Come on, Cas, we talked about this.”

The man—apparently Cas—turned to Dean with a puzzled frown. “Did I not introduce myself?”

He seemed so sincere about it that Dean had to laugh again, but it made him feel better about the whole situation, so it was a much easier laugh. “Not even a little,” he confirmed, then held his hand out with a smile. “Dean Winchester.”

“Castiel Novak,” the man said.

Despite returning the friendliness of Dean’s greeting, he didn’t take the offered hand. He didn’t look at it, either, but Dean was sure those observant, augmented eyes of his hadn’t missed it. Even while they were fixed on Dean, the aperture kept shifting size and the quality of the light in them kept changing just enough to suggest movement. It made Dean uncomfortable to see, sent a little shiver up his spine at how unusual and unnatural Castiel’s gaze was, but he didn’t know how to look away when they were staring at him so determinedly.

Both problems were solved when the woman walked over and shook his hand instead. “Charlie Bradbury. Don’t mind Cas—he’s got a thing about touching people, it’s not personal.”

“I do not have a thing.”

When Dean glanced back at Cas, he’d turned his focus to Charlie. As much of a relief as it was to have those unsettling eyes off him, he recognized the frustrated expression on the rest of Cas’s face. It reminded him so much of Sam, of all the times he’d been overwhelmed and unable to explain why, that Dean had to intervene.

“Sentinel senses, right? I get it. I had to quit coffee cold turkey because my last partner could smell it in my sweat. It was bad enough that she had to deal with it on just about everyone else, but at least she could get away from them. Since we were together all the time, it actually risked zoning her out.”

That brought Cas’s attention back on him like a snap. “Your last partner was a sentinel?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. All of them have been. We get a lot of sentinels born in Kansas, but not nearly as many guides, and not all of those guides want to be cops. So those of us who do are always matched with a sentinel.”

It was a simple enough explanation, as far as Dean was concerned, and also a common one. While sentinels and guides had once been about evenly matched—some sources even claimed guides had been more prevalent for a time—that hadn’t been the case for generations. More sentinels were born each year, and fewer guides. The numbers were especially stacked in places like Kansas: large population, few resources.

Something about it made Cas’s face shutter, though. Dean found out what that was immediately, when he found himself ignored as Cas rounded on Cesar and demanded of him, rather than Dean, “He’s a guide?”

“Yeah,” Dean answered for himself, “he is.” Cas’s reaction and tone undid the ease he’d fallen into; he was right back to where he’d been after their awkward start in the elevator.

In fact, he felt wrong-footed on more levels than ever. It had been weird enough that he didn’t get much information about the team he was joining, but he’d expected them to at least know about him. A survey of the rest of them didn’t help matters; no one else looked at all surprised or upset by the news. Charlie shot him a sympathetic grimace and the man she’d been arguing with was watching Cas and Cesar with what looked like amused interest. The other woman, still seated, gave nothing away, but Cesar had a stubborn, resigned set to his jaw.

Dean was pretty good at reading people. Guides were exceptionally empathetic to begin with, and he had years of police experience to perfect it. The whole team had known about him except for Cas and it had been Cesar’s call to keep him in the dark. Which meant he knew Cas would have a problem with it and Cas’s problem mattered, which meant Cas was the sentinel they wanted to pair him with. And Cas hadn’t known he was getting—and clearly didn’t want—a guide partner.

Which meant Dean’s job was going to suck. He turned his own glare on their supervisor. “This is what you meant by throwing me in,” he accused. “You’re not testing me against your cases, you’re testing me against him when he’s spun up.”

“I am not ‘spun up’,” Cas grated out, but it was still directed at Cesar.

The idea of people not liking guides wasn’t new. Their abilities weren’t as visible or obvious as sentinels’, harder to understand without firsthand experience; sentinels could demonstrate their skills to anyone, but guides could only work with the specific brain structures found in sentinels. The unknown made people nervous. Even aside from that, there were the ones who thought guides were psychics of some sort and could mess with their thoughts. Not true, but sensational enough that the people who clung to it did so with gusto.

Sentinels, though—Dean had never run into that bullshit from a sentinel. Sure, a lot of them were assholes when it came to pretty much every interaction they ever had with another human being, but it wasn’t prejudiced dickishness. Even the ones who didn’t need dedicated guide partners appreciated what guides could do and their increasing scarcity.

He’d never had a sentinel straight-up pretend he didn’t exist; it was as childish as it was baffling.

Cesar looked between the two of them, his mouth a thin line within the frame of his goatee, and Dean wrestled down his instinctive desire to lash out. He was new and uncomfortably uncertain of his welcome, he couldn’t afford to piss off the boss no matter how justified he felt in it. No matter how pissed he was at his dream job being involved in some kind of power play.

“I don’t need a guide.” His new partner clearly didn’t share Dean’s reservations, because he marched up to Cesar and squared off with him confrontationally. “My control is exemplary—”

“You zoned out on me six months ago.” The seated woman finally spoke, drawing everyone’s attention; her voice was somehow hard and soft at the same time, quiet but unyielding. “In the middle of the street, Cas.”

“It was only a minor partial zone. One of my ocular implants malfunctioned. The necessary maintenance was performed and it won’t happen again.”

“Yeah, and how is that different from the maintenance that you got a few weeks before that, when you left Ash high and dry with no one to watch his back when he was plugged in? Hey Dean,” she added without looking at him, “how about you tell Cas here when they approached you for a spot on this particular team?”

Dean didn’t answer, but she wasn’t looking for an answer. She was using him as a prop, trying to prove a point in whatever ongoing feud she had with Cas, and he didn’t appreciate it any more than Cas’s attitude.

Predictably, she continued on without his input. “Six months. Any thoughts about that timeline, Castiel?”

In any other circumstances, Dean might’ve felt bad for the guy; his team had been all but conspiring against him by the sound of it. It wasn’t usually a sentinel’s fault when they zoned: they’d get so fixated on a single sense that they’d lose track of everything else, unable to break away from it. That was what they needed guides for.

Refusing to get help from a guide for repeated zones did kind of make it his fault, though, so it sounded like he deserved it. Especially if he’d endangered them—and that it had come in the form of someone being left connected into the cyberscape, defenseless in a dangerous situation, was too close to a memory for Dean to forgive. People died that way.

“I think it’s absurd that you’re so focused on a single error that hasn’t reoccurred outside of that brief window. You worry about my performance in the field, but you’d put your trust—expect me to put my trust,” he stressed, turning the argument back to Cesar, “in a person who was dragged up from the middle of the Dust Bowl not because he’s a skilled asset to the team, but because Command thinks I need a paraesthetically predisposed babysitter.”

“Hey!” Dean started, tense with anger, but Cesar was faster and louder:

“Enough. This is not up for debate and you’re embarrassing yourselves in front of your new teammate, who went through exactly the same testing and application process as anyone else. Sit down and shut up, since it looks like I’m going to be doing the introductions.”

When Cas looked ready to keep arguing, Cesar fixed him with a hard stare, made all the steelier by the almost-smiling tick at the corner of his lips. “Dean’s presence on this team is final. Yours doesn’t have to be.”

It was an empty threat. It had to be. A sentinel with augs like Cas’s, zone-prone or not, was too valuable of an investment to be dismissed from duty for a little minor insubordination. Bluff or not, it worked; Cas ground his jaw but sat in the chair next to the one Charlie had vacated. She returned to her seat with an apologetic mix of a smile and a grimace directed at Dean, then it was just him and Cesar left standing.

Cesar clapped him on the shoulder then went back to his position at the head of the table. “Back on track,” he said, his mild cheer sounding impressively unforced despite the obvious command in his words. “The rest of the team: Ash and Billie.” He indicated the guy who’d been playfully arguing with Charlie and the woman who’d been viciously arguing with Cas.

He sat and motioned for Dean to do the same. There were a few extra chairs around the table, but it left Dean with two options and neither of them was very appealing. He chose the lesser of two evils, taking a seat between Billie and Cuevas instead of between Ash and Cas.

Maybe it was the wrong decision, but Cesar moved right along without giving him time to second-guess himself.

“Main order of business is we’ve got a new case. A little different from our usual. The crime we’re investigating didn’t take place in the cyberscape, and we’re actually not sure yet if there even is a crime. But we’ve got the best team for it and this one is politically sensitive—potentially disastrous, really—so you’re all going to be on your best form. Is that clear?”

He waited for everyone to nod, Dean included, before tapping his tablet to project an image of a teenage boy onto the center of the table.

“Kevin Tran,” he announced. “Eighteen. Software prodigy. Missing for three days, along with all his equipment and notes.”

Across from Dean, Charlie blew out a breath. “I’ve only heard rumors about what the kid was working on,” she said, “but if they’re true…”

When she didn’t finish the sentence, Ash ended it for her. “I wouldn’t put money on finding him alive, boss.”

Dean had been told, when he signed on for the CS team, that he didn’t need to have any particularly specialized technological knowledge. He wasn’t sure how much he believed of what he’d been told, after the cluster of meeting his new partner, so he was relieved when Billie asked, “You know him?”

“Of him,” corrected Charlie. “Hit the techie servers four years back and made waves, everyone’s looking at him for something big. Real genius. Prodigy, like Cesar said.”

“And what’s the genius gotten himself into that’s so dangerous?”

Charlie and Ash exchanged a look. He answered, “Encryption. Next level stuff, like the kind of thing that gets you attention from the governments and conglomerates you least want attention from.”

“That’s the gist of it.” Cesar shut down the picture and everyone’s attention turned back to him. “I’m sure this will end up being an all-hands operation, but we’re starting low-key to try and avoid media fuss.”

A sinking feeling in the pit of Dean’s stomach predicted what was coming next: “Cas, Dean, you’re taking lead. You’ll call the rest of us in when you have something to go on.”

Cesar sent Cas another quelling look, but Cas didn’t even notice. His eyes, which certainly looked like they could be capable of killing a man if he wanted them to, were too busy glaring at Dean.


	2. Chapter 2

For all that Cas pointedly ignored Dean on their four-hour flight, he didn’t need to be a guide to read the condescending judgment rolling off the man. Or a sentinel to see his exasperated scowl curve deeper and deeper every time Dean’s fingers clenched tighter around the armrests, as though Dean’s discomfort was making Cas suffer, too. That was just fine with Dean. In fact, he would’ve amped up his stress responses just to irritate the sentinel’s senses if he weren’t already riding the edge of panic—but he was, and holding that in was already all he could do.

NEI was better funded than Dean’s old department, better funded than any other police agency in the country. President Roman’s lawmakers preferred to keep money in their own pockets, but they had a personal interest in NEI not falling apart, so they begrudgingly set aside just enough to keep things running. So the fleet plane that he and Cas were on was tiny and rundown, and every bump of turbulence made something behind Dean’s seat rattle.

He kept telling himself that he wasn’t going die. He also kept not believing himself. That was normal for Dean on a plane, the very few times he’d had reason to be in one. The absolutely worst part was that the whole time he could hear Cas’s voice in his head, cold and hard, accusing him of being a glorified babysitter who wasn’t up for the real job.

So when they finally touched down and Dean could let out his breath, when Cas finally acknowledged his existence long enough to sneer, “We are the highest level agency with national jurisdiction. Travel is a regular part of our work and you—” Dean didn’t bother to hold in his bad mood.

“Go fuck yourself,” he said. “I’m driving.”

Then it was Dean’s turn to stare ahead without engaging as he navigated the streets—nicer than Kansas, worse than D.C.—to get them to Kevin Tran’s home. He stewed the whole way, furious about Cas’s attitude and Cesar’s dismissal of it and his own loss of control. Just because his partner was a dick didn’t mean he should be one, too. Not that he was about to apologize, no fucking way, but he could do better. He could prove, to the rest of the team if not to Cas, that he deserved to be there.

The Tran house looked like every other house in its neighborhood: whitewashed concrete and reinforced plexi windows, corn-plastic grass behind steel and concrete gates. Linda Tran, Kevin’s mother, greeted them at the door with a businesslike, “You’re going to find my son.” It was much more command than question and Dean appreciated the just-about vote of confidence after the rest of the day’s bullshit.

“We’re going to do everything we can, ma’am,” he assured her before Cas could give voice to whatever was behind his tightening expression. “I’m NEI Agent Dean Winchester. This is my partner, Agent Castiel Novak.”

They hadn’t run a profile on Linda—sloppy, in Dean’s opinion—so he didn’t know if she was where Kevin had gotten his brains. But she wasn’t an idiot and clearly picked up on the tension between them if her frown was anything to go by. Dean guiltily resolved to do better making sure it stayed just between them.

“We know you’ve already covered a lot in your interviews with the Michigan Police,” he said. “We don’t want to waste your time or ours duplicating that, so if it’s okay with you I’d like to start in Kevin’s room.”

When she led them up to it, it was just as the state police had described: the scene was clean, well-organized. It looked like Kevin had packed up his belongings and left, but Linda insisted he would never have done so of his own free will without telling her. It was also highly suspicious that his chip hadn’t been scanned at all in that time, even by ambient surveillance that tended to catch anyone out in public. Either he was wearing blocking wristbands, which were illegal but not impossible for civilians to get, or he was off the grid entirely.

Or he was dead.

But when Cas raised that possibility, less gently than Dean would’ve done, she gave them another odd look. “Didn’t the police tell you? He’s been logging into the server that he and his girlfriend set up, every single day. He’s just not saying or doing anything. They asked me to set up a meeting with Channing today, I assumed it was for you.”

“They did not tell us,” Cas grumbled. Dean couldn’t even fault him for his irritation; maybe it had been because they were mad that NEI was taking their case or maybe they were just dicks all the time, but it was glaring and more than just an oversight. There hadn’t been any mention in the files they got. “When is this meeting?”

Linda checked the clock display. “She should already be there and will be waiting for another three hours.”

“Okay, and where are we going?”

That got Dean yet another judgmental glance. “The server.”

“Not in person?”

“No, she’s not local. And no, before you ask, Kevin isn’t with her. They both would’ve told me and he has no way of getting to Vietnam.”

Dean hoped that was true, but they still needed to verify. Not to mention that since they hadn’t even known who Channing Ngo was or why they should care about her, it left them without a good background on yet another person involved in their high-profile investigation. But there was no way they would be able to get that done before their three-hour window for meeting Channing was up, and they couldn’t miss that chance. He asked if Linda would mind giving them time to do just that and she obliged.

Cas at least waited until Linda left before questioning Dean. “This isn’t a secure location to connect from, not to mention that we still don’t know the circumstances of Kevin’s disappearance. We should make the attempt from the barracks, where we can be sure of the firewall.”

“Because you think the child prodigy of encryption is going to have a private server that lets any asshole behind a firewall in?”

“If that’s your argument, you could just as easily extend it to suggest that even this connection won’t let us through unchallenged, so then what difference does it make?”

“The difference that it makes,” Dean said, pulling out his CS glasses and motion-sensing wrist bands because he was syncing in with or without Cas’s approval, “is that he might be hot shit in cyberscape security, but in the real world he’s a kid from a sheltered suburb in Michigan with private security, three gates, and a biolock door between his room and anything scary. Nothing has ever come near enough to threaten him and I bet you it hadn’t even occurred to him before now that anything ever could.”

By the time he finished, Cas was staring at him. The simmering resentment and hostility had left his expression, replaced by a furrowed brow that read as bafflement to Dean. For a man who was half machine, whose scowl made his eyes look like weapons and somehow emphasized the web of unnatural tubing that veined his skin, there was an almost childish innocence to the way he tilted his head in puzzlement.

Dean shoved that thought down and pushed on with the point he was making, because if it got that reaction from Cas then he’d probably grown up with just as much privilege as Tran, or more. And if working for NEI hadn’t disabused him of that obliviousness, then Dean really wasn’t the one who had only made it to the team because of his background. Augmentation cost money, and mods on Cas’s scale—both in number and quality—had to be worth more than Dean made in ten years in Kansas. No way he’d earned them on NEI pay.

He knew all about rich, connected kids who got every opportunity, every chance; he knew even more about kids who didn’t.

“Physical security measures, right? He’s got no idea.” Turning his back to Cas, he found one of the thin cyberscape conduits lined up on Tran’s desk, which must have once led to an extensive array of equipment, none of which was there anymore. Over his shoulder, without looking back, he said, “But you know, do what you want. Not like I can force you either way. You can stay and sniff around or lick the walls or whatever it is you do, but I’m gonna take our best shot at getting any kind of lead at all.”

Then he slipped the conduit into the port at the side of his glasses. The connection flashed through the glasses and down to the motion bands; he saw darkness for a moment, then graphics that were all but indistinguishable from reality faded in. He only had a second to feel smug about it—he’d been right, Cas had been wrong, and he was standing in Kevin Tran’s server to prove it—before Cas appeared next to him.

Like Dean, his avatar was a simple digital representation of himself. His was even accurate down to the trench coat he wore in the real world, whereas Dean had replaced his generic police jumpsuit with a generic shirt and slacks that looked fine but definitely weren’t coordinated with his current outfit. What a ridiculous waste of time and resources, setting that up—he must have programmed it in that morning before their flight just to be prepared.

“That was reckless,” Cas accused. His voice came through the small speaker in the earpiece attached to Dean’s glasses at the same time as Dean heard it from Cas standing near him in the room; Cas’s mic and the conduit Tran had to his server were both high quality, which didn’t come as a surprise. At least it would be nice not to have to deal with a dissonant echo.

His own voice definitely sounded crystal clear to his ears when he said, “Blow me, Cas.” Then he took a moment to hope that the server didn’t autolog; or that if it did, no one important would ever have a reason to pull up the recording.

A shadowy figure Dean hadn’t seen before moved away from a wall. Of course. Linda had told them Channing was already there. Her avatar didn’t have any detail to it, just dull blackness in the vague shape of a person, but Dean still got the sense he was being judged. Fair enough.

“You’re the agents I’m supposed to meet?”

They confirmed it and she gave them what information she had, which wasn’t much: Kevin’s avatar appeared every afternoon, stood there without responding for a varying amount of time, then logged out. They asked a few more questions about Kevin before his disappearance, but it seemed Linda’s assessment had been right and Channing claimed not to know anything about what had happened. Letting her know someone else from the team—Charlie or Ash—would be in touch to check on the technical side of things, they ended the interview.

Dean disconnected before Cas, which meant he had his glasses off in time to see that Cas had the conduit running straight to a port open on the inside of his wrist, just above where his chip was. He blinked, certain he’d misjudged it somehow, but another look showed the same thing: no glasses, no bands. Cas had plugged the connection directly into himself and pulled it free as Dean watched.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Dean snapped.

At the words, Cas’s head jerked up and over to him, but Dean kept staring at the too-familiar shape of the hole in Cas’s arm; kept staring even after Cas had pressed a circle of synthskin back in place to cover it. If it had been anything else, he could’ve written it off as just another mod, built in since Cas already had the eye implants and skeletal augs to track his movements, but that port—he knew that port.

“What, Dean?”

“That’s a direct neuro-uplink. You have a fucking neurolink? Are you crazy or just suicidal?”

Direct neural connections to the cyberscape had been cutting edge tech seven or so years before, the exciting next step toward full immersion: people could skip all the other equipment and the link would receive commands straight from their brain. It would feed responses back the same way, sending cyberscape data right into processing centers so the person saw and heard and felt things like they were real.

Everyone had been excited by the idea, right up until the first round of tech tests killed every last user. Fried their brains, sent them into seizures that led to comas that led to death. So had the second round four years ago. There hadn’t been a third.

And Cas stood there like it was nothing to have thrown himself into that number—onto that pile of corpses. If anything, he looked irritated at Dean’s reaction. “Yes, but it’s more advanced than earlier attempts and as a sentinel I’m equipped to handle—”

“Bullshit.” Dean’s voice was rough when he cut in, angry and not trying to hide it. “It kills sentinels, too.”

Cas frowned at him. “No. Previous versions hadn’t been tested on sentinels.”

“They sure fucking had been. They sure fucking burned them out just like everyone else.”

For as long as he lived, Dean would be haunted by Sam’s vacant stare and the thin trickles of blood dripping from his eyes, his ears, his mouth and nose. And right there on the inside of his elbow, still linked in when Dean found him, was the exact same port as Cas had hidden beneath seemingly innocuous skin. It was Dean’s greatest failure, as a guide and as a brother. He’d let Sammy die.

Cas was a dick but that didn’t mean Dean could let it happen again.

“You can’t use that, Cas. It’s going to kill you, maybe slower than it would because you’re a sentinel but it’s still fucking lethal. Whoever put that in lied to you, if that’s what they said. You can’t trust them.”

“But I should trust you,” Cas sneered back, “over the woman who raised me. Naomi would never—”

“She would! You know how I know that? Because she did!”

Cas rounded on him, pushed right into his space, and Dean was reminded in a flash that Cas’s eyes weren’t his only or even most pronounced augmentation. All those oil and coolant tubes led to bulked up muscles and reinforced bones; he hadn’t seen it in action, but Cas had to be inhumanly strong. Dean wasn’t bad in a fight, not after so many years working the Kansas slums, but he wouldn’t stand a chance against all that if it came to blows. He didn’t back down, though; he glared right back into Cas’s glowing eyes and tried not to think about whether they would still bleed.

“You know nothing—”

“Agents!”

Linda Tran stood in the doorway of her son’s room, arms crossed and expression far more disapproving than either of theirs. Sheepish, Dean backed away first. He wasn’t done having it out with Cas, but it wasn’t the place. He did note the fact that Cas seemed just as startled as he was by her appearance, though; with his enhanced hearing, he should’ve been aware of her coming long before she got there. That he hadn’t meant he was too focused on Dean, and that kind of focus was dangerous for a sentinel. That was what led to zones, and whether Cas thought he was above them or not, evidence pointed to him being vulnerable.

He wondered how long Cas had been linking directly into the cyberscape, and particularly whether it coincided with his apparently new tendency to zone out.

They made their apologies to Mrs. Tran and Dean got behind the wheel again without asking or giving Cas the opportunity to protest. From the way Cas was rubbing his forehead as he looked out the window, he might not have even tried to argue.

“Headache?”

He tried to keep his voice neutral, maybe even push some concern in there, but he was still shaking with so much furious adrenaline that just keeping the car on the road took up most of his self control. Add in Cas’s sentinel hearing and it wasn’t a surprise that he saw right through Dean’s attempt to couch his true intent.

“Just a headache,” he said pointedly. “It has nothing to do with my link or my senses, regardless of what I’m sure you’re thinking. If anything, you’re the cause.”

“Me?” Dean twisted to stare at him incredulously and had to clench his fingers to keep them on the wheel instead of following through on the impulse to do something physical and unpleasant to his partner. They couldn’t both give in to self-destructive urges on the same case, on the same day. In fact, he’d like it if neither of them did. “You have tech in your head that has never before failed to cause fatal brain damage and you think it’s my fault you have a headache after using it.”

“It hasn’t killed me.”

“Yet!” Dean felt absolutely no guilt for the way Cas flinched away from his yell. “There is nothing, absolutely nothing in the world, that could possibly be worth doing that to yourself.”

“You know nothing about me or my life. Being imposed on your previous partners because they couldn’t control themselves doesn’t mean you have any idea what it’s like to be a sentinel.”

“Because your control has been so great, from what I’ve heard.”

“There was a maintenance issue with my implants, which is still preferable to having to rely on someone like you to monitor my every move.”

“Someone like—you know what, fine. You want to kill yourself because you’re too good to associate with someone like me, go right the fuck ahead. Maybe you’re right and you’re so special with your augs that none of this basic human shit can touch you. Or—and this is reality, sorry, not whatever fantasy your obsessive nutjob of a chop-surgeon raised you believing—you’ll destroy yourself and I can get myself a partner who isn’t a soulless robot.”

Even Dean’s normal hearing could make out the increased flow in Cas’s coolant tubes as he tensed angrily, but Cas fixed his unnatural stare out the window again and just said, “Take us back to the hotel.”

“Right,” Dean ground out, “gotta recharge.”

They spent the rest of the drive in a charged, hateful silence that carried them all the way into the secured garage and up to their unfortunately shared room. Cas made it inside first, but Dean pushed past him—ignoring the fact that it hurt his shoulder and didn’t really move Cas at all—and shut himself in the bathroom. He’d initially just planned to take a piss and brush the bad tastes of the day out of his mouth, but when he saw that they had a halfway decent shower, he changed his mind.

Stripping down without a second thought, he stepped into the instant hot water. His new place in D.C. had that, but the barracks in Kansas definitely hadn’t, and he still appreciated the amenity. The water felt so good, just the right temperature and pressure to wash away not just the grime but the stress that had built up. He soaped up his chest with the inoffensively neutral body wash provided—he honestly didn’t even know if Cas had an enhanced sense of smell, which was the least of their communication problems, but since it was a barracks-affiliated hotel, they probably had a lot of police sentinels coming through as either guests or security.

It was as he was sluicing off the suds that the next impulse occurred to him: he was off duty, on his own personal time, and a bit more stress relief sounded like just the thing to end what had been a pretty shitty day on a less shitty note. Of course, there was a sentinel right outside who would undoubtedly hear everything he did, but he wasn’t inclined to let that stop him. If anything, the potential to bother Cas with his activities was a bonus rather than a deterrent. Two birds, one orgasm.

He moseyed out of the bathroom in no great hurry, wearing nothing but a towel. He hadn’t brought anything clean in, since he hadn’t planned on showering, and he wasn’t about to put the old clothes back on. Besides, after the show he’d just put on, he had no reason to be shy around Cas.

It turned out to be a moot concern, in the end, because Cas was under the blanket on one of the beds and had his back deliberately turned to the door as Dean came through it. He didn’t move or speak until Dean had changed and settled into the remaining bed on the other side of the room, then he got up and hurried to the bathroom himself.

Insincere and spiteful, Dean called after him, “Sorry, did you need that? I just assumed you were too technologically advanced for peeing.”

Cas slammed the door without answering him, which was about what Dean expected. He drifted off before he got a chance to antagonize Cas further, since the sentinel stayed in there long enough for the sated sleepiness of Dean’s shower session to kick in.


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning, Cas was already awake and dressed when Dean’s alarm went off—if he’d even slept at all. Dean pushed that thought aside as soon as it crossed his mind, but he was still annoyed at himself for considering it as a possibility however briefly. He refused to buy in to Cas’s superiority complex, even in the privacy of his own thoughts. Sentinel or not, cyborg or not, soulless or not, Cas wasn’t invulnerable. As he’d eventually find out, when his brain started leaking out every orifice it could. Just remembering the argument, how stubborn he’d been about something that the rest of the world knew to be true, made Dean’s blood boil.

As soon as he’d put on his own clothes—ignored by his partner, who was clearly very busy with the morning news cycle—he said, “I’m going for breakfast,” and left without giving Cas a chance to respond. He was half tempted to leave the hotel and wander the surrounding blocks in search of anywhere else to eat, both as a way to kill time and to avoid the possibility of Cas coming down to join him and pissing him off more. Assuming, which Dean was absolutely going to do, that the man needed to eat. Whether he would or not was a different question, and not one that was Dean’s problem.

Still, he didn’t end up going anywhere else, because he had a job to do regardless of his annoyance. The fact was that Cas’s welfare was actually kind of his problem, since he’d been partnered with him as a guide specifically. Even more than that, Kevin Tran’s welfare was his problem, and going for an hour-long spite breakfast wouldn’t do anything to find the missing kid. So he kept his exploration to the main floor of the hotel, hoping he could at least get some caffeine in him before having to deal with his partner’s bullshit again.

The very first thing he located was the kettle of burnt coffee. He filled and then downed a cup of the scalding, acrid liquid without stopping for breath—he didn’t give a shit if Cas could smell it on him or not, though it did bother him that he didn’t know. If he was going to be even halfway decent at the part of his job that involved Cas’s welfare as a sentinel, he needed to know the guy’s sensory limits. Picking it up a bit at a time from watching Cas was a frustratingly useless way to do it. So far he knew Cas had some kind of enhanced hearing and probably vision, given the implants, but absolutely nothing about the scope or even whether they came naturally or were solely due to the implants; whether Cas been born with sentinel eyes and replaced them, out of necessity or obsession, or if he’d decided to upgrade because he was too good for normal eyes.

Since there seemed to be absolutely no chance that Cas would get over himself and tell Dean anything helpful, he’d just have to make opportunities for himself to find out. He drank a second cup still standing by the kettle, hoping it would trouble Cas just like it had troubled Miranda. The roof of his mouth on fire but his nerves starting to wake up properly, he refilled his coffee for the road and grabbed some kind of mostly stale roll from the nearby basket. He didn’t bother to check what kind of spreadable flavored oil they had, since they all tasted like the same nothingness, and he hated the greasy feeling they left on his tongue. At least the lingering fat from meat had a good flavor to it—real meat, not the various substitutes that were all his family could afford growing up and that Sam hated. The residue from oil spreads tasted like the smell that still clung to the long-drained oil fields of central Kansas.

Half the dry bread was already crammed into his mouth and dragging down his esophagus, helped along by a few more swallows of coffee, when he stepped off the elevator onto the third floor not even fifteen minutes after he’d left it. Halfway down the hallway, he almost walked right into Cas. Dean at least had the excuse of looking down into his styrocorn cup, which he thought really should have had more coffee in it but had come up empty when he raised it to his lips; Cas had apparently just expected Dean to move out of his way, because he looked deeply offended at having had to stop. Or maybe that was just his reaction to seeing Dean at all.

Granted, Dean wasn’t all that enthused about running into his partner just then, either.

“Going somewhere?” The crumbs of crust stuck in his throat and made his voice rough and deep, almost as gravelly as Cas’s, which earned him something like a glare. Then again, that could have been due to the fact that it made him sound a lot like he had the night before, in the shower.

Either way, Cas just scowled and said, “Back to the Tran house. I need to take another look around without distractions.”

His pointed emphasis on the last word made it pretty clear exactly what he meant by that, but Dean confirmed it anyway, hoping his own tone made his counterpoint equally clear. “You’re planning to go do your sentinel shit without any backup.” It was a dumb idea even for someone without a recent history of zoning on cases, but it wasn’t as though he expected anything better from a man who thought his implants could make him invincible.

“Yes,” Cas answered, stepping around him.

This partnership, Dean realized, was going to be like repeatedly bashing his head into a brick wall. Eventually either the head or the wall had to break, but since the wall was a stand-in for Cas’s stubborn lack of self-preservation, it was already crumbling and he gave himself pretty good odds. He just had to outlast the frustration and feelings of futility, and eventually Cas would either fuck up monumentally enough that he wouldn’t be able to refuse Dean’s help or fuck up so monumentally that nothing Dean could do would help.

But he still had to try.

“How about no. Not only are we working this case together, but it’s my ass on the line if you get your ass thrown in a zone and I have to explain to Cesar why I wasn’t there to stop it.”

“I’ve told you I don’t need a babysitter—”

“Well, our boss thinks you do. NEI command thinks you do. And I answer to them, not your ego, so. No, I’m not going to let you just go off and start turning your super special senses on with no one there to keep an eye on you.”

The look Cas fixed him with could have melted pseudoplastic, but Dean was made of stronger stuff. He stared right back, setting his jaw and trying not to feel too ridiculous that he was still holding his empty coffee cup and half-eaten breakfast while facing off against a half-cyborg sentinel in a narrow hotel hallway. The pinprick intensity of Cas’s eyes made it harder both to keep up the gaze and to look away, but Dean held out until Cas scoffed and his mechanical pupils zoomed and refocused—though they didn’t leave Dean.

“There is no ‘turning on’ my senses.” Cas actually raised his hands and curled his fingers in the air to suggest quotation marks; the rush of bubbles in the coolant tube that ran along his right forearm only served to emphasize the absurdity of it: artificially strengthened bones and muscles that could crush Dean’s skull like nothing, being used to make air quotes. That had nothing on the absurdity—the absolute shattering stupidity—of what Cas was saying. “They’re always functioning at full capacity.”

“Are you—you’re not joking. Fuck, no wonder you’re a mess.” Cas scowled somehow still harder and tried to interrupt, but Dean pushed right on and didn’t let him. “You know that’s not normal, right? Not healthy. I mean, shit, they should be at normal levels more often than they’re dialed up—like, a lot more. Sentinels who don’t shut down go crazy and then they die. That’s—that’s basic shit. They die, Cas, every time.”

The frown didn’t drop off Cas’s face, but it did stretch into something condescending that set Dean’s teeth even more on edge. “Of course I’m not joking. My senses don’t need to be shut down—that would be inefficient, particularly for field work. I could miss something vital just because I didn’t know to be paying close attention. Regardless, this is how I have operated since childhood and I don’t intend to change that just because you don’t think it ought to be possible.

“You seem to believe a lot of things should kill me, yet I’m still alive and unharmed. Being a fully functional sentinel should kill me. Having a direct neural connection should kill me. Have you ever considered, Dean, that the sentinels saddled with you in the past have just been inadequate? That they’re not victims of technology or biology, but of their own innate weakness? That perhaps they died because they had the misfortune of having been born and trained in a shithole like Kansas?”

Dean hauled back and punched him.

It felt like hitting metal—and maybe it was, beneath the layers of skin and augmented muscle fiber. He didn’t know how much of Cas’s skeleton had been reinforced or even replaced, but it was solid enough that Dean’s fist connecting with the side of his face only snapped his head to the side, and even that was brief. He recovered his posture before Dean, who was left cradling fingers that might have been broken, feeling like three kinds of idiot and no less angry for it.

“I’m going to the Trans’ now,” Cas said, his voice even. It felt much more dangerous than his yelling. “You should stay here and consider how you plan to answer to our boss, since you were so concerned about that before.”

Dean squeezed the already-crushed cup in the fist he’d used to throw the punch. Cas was going to report him. Of course he was—objectively, Dean knew he deserved to be reported. But he was still seething at Cas’s words. He didn’t give a shit what Cas thought of Kansas, but the suggestion that Sam had died because he was weak, that he’d deserved it for not being good enough—just thinking about it was almost enough to make Dean try hitting him again.

He didn’t. Grinding his teeth to push it down, he nodded and unclenched his jaw just long enough to make himself say, “Yeah, maybe it’s best you go alone after all.”

A bit of separation was probably good for them, anyway, and if Cas got himself messed up it would only serve him right. Dean had less reason than ever to stick his neck out for the guy. He refused to allow the tendril of guilt that tried to worm its way between his ribs as he shouldered Cas aside. Knowing it only happened because Cas, made of steel and titanium and chrome and plastimetal and righteous asshole, allowed it to happen—moved out of the way in order to avoid letting Dean touch him, it seemed—worsened both the anger and the pull on his conscience. But those canceled each other out well enough to both be ignored.

Once he’d shut himself back inside their room, he sat on the edge of his bed and dropped his face in his hands. He’d earned a minute or two of indulgent self-recrimination: punching Cas might have been the stupidest thing he’d done in his life. He’d wanted to work for NEI since he first started as a state officer, had spent his whole career developing the experience and training he would need for it, had spent the better part of a year in the application process before he was even considered for the CS team. And he’d thrown it away in a single moment of temper.

His tenure at NEI was probably over, seeing as he’d assaulted his partner less than twenty-four hours into the new job. The reasons behind it wouldn’t matter, not when no one on the team knew him, no one would understand or back him. At least Kansas would probably take him back, as long as he didn’t get himself killed or arrested. They were always hurting for guides. He’d hate going back and would get all kinds of shit from everyone in the barracks for not being able to hack his dream job, but at least it would be good work.

He allowed himself one last sigh, then forced it out of his head. Until that happened, he was going to finish out his first—and almost certainly last—case, and Cas could go fuck himself for thinking Dean wasn’t up for it.

That resolution powered him off his ass and over to the small kitchenette table, where he’d left his newly issued comm. It was still on the early side, but he’d gotten a message while he was out getting breakfast; or more likely, judging by the time it came in, he had been arguing with Cas in the hallway on his way back. Whichever the case, it was recent and from Charlie, saying she’d been in touch with Channing and together they had arranged for the team to have access to Kevin’s server from wherever they connected—which included Dean and Cas at the hotel.

Charlie herself would be staying linked in to the server, waiting for Kevin to make a repeat appearance and poking around to see what else she could turn up in the logs and code that less elite, less skilled individuals may have missed. That seemed like as good a place as any to start, especially since it didn’t require leaving the hotel and he wasn’t sure he could be trusted around people in reality yet. Cas, and especially his reaction to Cas, had shaken him enough that he figured it might be best to keep the world out of punching range for the time being.

Setting up his cyberscape conduit took less than a minute, since his gear was all still configed from the day before. Glasses on, wristbands on, and in no time he was linked in with no trouble at all. Kevin’s server looked the same as it had, other than the absence of Channing’s shadowy avatar. Despite her promise to monitor the server, Charlie’s wasn’t there to replace it; there was no one else in the constructed room when he connected inside.

Or so he thought, until Charlie’s voice popped into his headphones unexpectedly. “Hey! You got my message.”

“Uh.” He scanned the area again, studying what was displayed in his glasses and sending a query to the server. It all came back empty. “Charlie?”

“Yeah. Don’t bother, you don’t have the skills or tech to find me, and if I’ve done it right then neither will Kevin Tran. Or whoever else is logging in as him.”

“You don’t think they’ll spook that Channing’s gone?”

“Nah. It’s not like she’s here all the time—she’s got a job, lives halfway around the world, you know.”

“Do we know that? She was a surprise, we didn’t get any background on her. Our interview didn’t really get us anything either, so unless you guys got something—”

“Of course we did.” Charlie sounded equal parts smug and jokingly offended—he hoped jokingly, at least. It was a little disconcerting, talking to an empty room. Made him feel a bit like he was losing his mind, and also made it impossible to get a read on her. Cyberscape avatars weren’t particularly good for that most of the time anyway, but they would’ve revealed more than empty space did: if the she was looking at him or away, if her hands were moving and how. Her tone reminded him of when they’d met and she’d been happily arguing with Ash, so joking seemed more likely than not.

“I got her whole life tracked down after you guys passed on her info yesterday, no problem. Had to make sure she really was who we thought she was—who the Trans thought she was, too—and not involved in anything shady. The police keeping her from us was a dick move to be sure, but it takes more than that to throw me off my game.”

Dean grinned, somewhat awkwardly since he didn’t know which direction to do it in and settled for straight ahead. “Sorry for doubting you.”

“Forgiven. Just see that you don’t do it again.”

“Never,” Dean swore. “I’m way too impressed. You could really dig all that up from just a name and country?”

“Oh yeah. Honestly, she made it pretty easy by giving us that. I could’ve done it without, but it might’ve taken another hour. Maybe even two.”

He had to laugh, both at her cheerful cockiness and at how great it was to have a conversation with a member of his new team that didn’t feel like he was tiptoeing barefoot on broken glass. Or about to throw a punch. As nice as it was, though, it also reminded him that he was in a position to lose it. It wouldn’t have been so easy if Charlie was aware of his fight with Cas, he was knew that. He also knew it was generous and self-serving to think of it as a fight—he’d flat-out sucker punched his partner, even if it hadn’t achieved the desired effect.

Letting Charlie carry on like she could be his friend without knowing Dean would be a goner soon was probably self-serving too, but the harm seemed minimal enough. He could let it happen while it lasted: another hour, maybe even two. And if he was careful about it, maybe he could even get a sense from her about just how badly it was going to go for him. He already knew that not everyone on the team was happy with Cas’s solitary sentinel act, but he hadn’t gotten the impression that Charlie was among them and he didn’t think even Billie would approve of Dean’s reaction.

“So, you can find out everything about everyone, huh?” It wasn’t the most subtle segue into the conversation he wanted to have, but it would get there and Charlie didn’t act bothered by it.

“If it exists, I can find it,” she affirmed, then quickly added, “Not that I go digging in just anyone’s business. Only if there’s a reason, you know.”

“Right,” Dean agreed, “of course.”

They shared a moment of silence.

“Ever had a reason—”

She preempted him. “I got nothing on Cas.”

“You don’t know I was going to ask about him!”

“But you were though, right? Look, I get it. But honestly, I don’t have anything to docudump on him. I’m newest on the team before you, four years, and Cas has been there basically forever. Even Cesar hasn’t been there as long as him, and the last supervisor was a disaster and didn’t have or keep any records. I think Ash might’ve been there before Cas? But he thinks it’s fun not to tell anyone anything unless it’s for a case, and I’m sure as shit not gonna ask Cas.”

“Why’s that?”

“Take your usual sentinel level of people skills,” she said, “and cut that by about a third, then you’ve got Cas.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Dean said.

“Yeah. But he’s kind of a badass.”

“He sure thinks so.” Dean chewed his lip, considering. Spreading rumors might not look great for him when it came out that he’d swung at Cas, but it wasn’t just a rumor; it was true, and it was dangerous, and maybe someone else could try and fight that fight once Dean was gone. “Look, there’s something I gotta tell you.”

Charlie hadn’t known that Cas was neurolinking and shared Dean’s unhappiness at the news. Like Dean, she’d never heard anything good about it and had lost friends to the first wave. She promised to check in with Ash—he was more into the hardware side of things than she was and might be able to suss out exactly what type of terrible was in Cas’s head.


	4. Chapter 4

With nothing better to do after Charlie kicked him off the server so she could get some work done, he figured he should head over to the Trans’ to see if his partner was comatose in a zone yet. Cas had taken the car, of course, so he tracked down one of the officers stationed at the hotel for options. Since they didn’t have another vehicle they could spare indefinitely, they ended up sending a trainee from the barracks to give him a ride. Their trip was silent; the kid probably resented Dean for dragging him out of his actual work and Dean definitely resented everything about the situation.

He wanted to foster a good relationship with the locals, despite their rocky start with sabotaging the NEI investigation—after all, he’d been a police officer in Kansas just a few weeks before. While Kansas was far too impoverished to get any attention from national divisions, he’d had cases taken away from him by superiors who wanted to look good before. And while the Michigan barracks had resources Kansas could never have afforded even if they stopped paying their employees’ wages and board, he could still relate to their general way of life.

Making nice had to wait because Dean didn’t have the patience, especially not with someone who looked like he’d rather be scraping crimson addicts off the street than shuttling Dean around. If Michigan even had crimson addicts and didn’t just forcibly relocate them all to Ohio like the rest of the wealthier states did.

The trainee dropped Dean at the gate to the Trans’ complex so he could scan himself in and use the walk up to their house to try and collect himself before seeing Cas again. When he got there he didn’t feel ready yet; he decided to check around the outside of the house for anything they’d missed, and there he happened upon an extremely sketchy character eyeing the side of the fence like he was thinking about trying to scale it.

“Agent Winchester, NEI,” Dean called out. “Identify yourself, citizen.”

The man looked at him, blanched, and took off running. He had nowhere to go; the whole secured neighborhood ran in a straight line with only a single road going down the middle, leading to a single way out. Anywhere he went, Dean would see it—if it even took that long for him to catch up. Dean hadn’t been off low-level street work for long, so he was probably in better shape for chasing and brawling, if it came to that, than anyone else on the team. The man he was chasing ran like it wasn’t something he was used to.

Pursuing a fleeing suspect in nice pants and dress shoes was easier than doing it in full, heavy body armor in a lot of ways, though he did feel uncomfortably exposed—almost naked, really, with nothing covering his head. Thankful he at least had a thin ballistic vest, and that the neighborhood security had seemed to take their jobs seriously, he shouted, “Stop, police!” as he kept pelting down the pavement. He hated drawing attention, especially in a neighborhood like the Trans’ where it would definitely make the news, but it would be even worse if he ended up in a fight or using his weapon.

But catching a shady guy running away from the scene of the disappearance was worth making a bit of a fuss over. He yelled again, “Hey, stop!”

The man didn’t stop—of course he didn’t—but Dean was nearly on top of him, only a house and a half away from where they’d started. He shifted his shoulders, just about ready to launch into a tackle, when something dropped down in front of the man and he stopped so suddenly that Dean crashed into him after all—just in a much less controlled manner than he’d intended. Swearing and grabbing the man, both as a counterbalance and to stop him from doing anything while Dean was off-balance, Dean barely managed to keep himself from tumbling to the pavement.

No sooner had he regained his equilibrium than he lost it again, because he looked to see what started the fuss and there was Cas. He stood in front of the fleeing man, expression exactly as grave as it had been when Dean had last seen him. Unlike the last time Dean had seen him, or any of the times before that, giant wings flared out to either side of his body. Their construction reminded Dean—as he stared, dumbfounded—of Cas’s eyes: light metal formed the structure, which in the wings’ case comprised a chevron-shaped arch forming the top of each, but what really stood out were the parts made of bright, eerie blue light. Cas’s pupils. The vertical bars of energy propulsion blades that extended from the metal and filled out a shape like a bird’s wing.

“Identify yourself, citizen,” Cas intoned. He stood in the middle of the road, his wings still partly open like an afterthought; like it was a perfectly normal thing.

Dean had seen wing mods. They were a popular fantasy but rare in reality, and always geared to the aesthetic. Functional wings were an impossible dream, no matter how many reputable robotics companies and shady back-alley modders had made the attempt. The movements of a typical, naturalistic wing were too complex for most parts-makers to design, much less build, and the few people Dean had found with wing-like augs hadn’t had the money for anything like that. In fact, one of them had been a young man with the pair missing from a brothel girl who’d been scrapped for parts in Dean’s district not two weeks before. It was already too late to save him when he was dumped behind a med center with rejection fever.

But even more practical designs ran into a problem, which was that human bodies couldn’t handle the stress of supporting themselves like that. The strain on the bones and muscles—and just like that, Cas’s enhanced body had more context. Even without knowing most of the specifics, Dean had thought it was overkill, but he would need all of it reinforced, adjusted, crafted to withstand the force of wings that were built into him. And just like every single new thing Dean learned about his partner, it only served to prove how insane he and whoever had worked on him both were.

The man in Dean’s grasp recovered from that shock faster than Dean did—faster and smoother than it seemed like any reasonable person should. Tugging himself away from Dean, but only taking a single step out from between him and Cas, then raising his hands in deference to show he was stopping there, he introduced himself as Fergus: “A concerned neighbor, you understand.” 

“Bullshit,” Dean said with just as easy a smile. “We’ve got all the neighbors’ names and pictures. We’ve got the whole community’s names and pictures. You’re not one of them. So are you going to let us scan your chip or am I going to have to restrain you first?”

His lie, blatant as it was, worked—because Dean didn’t know all the neighbors’ names and faces, but it was obvious the man wasn’t among them. With an exaggerated sigh, the man held out his right arm as he said, “I wasn’t meant to draw attention.”

Before Dean could ask what exactly he meant by that, Cas passed the mobile reader over the man’s wrist and it beeped an alert tone. Not the warning for a criminal, but something much more dangerous; Dean took an only mostly voluntary step away from him and toward Cas to check the screen. It identified the man as Crowley, no other names or bio info given except that he was from D/C and worked as a staffer for President Dick Roman himself.

“President Roman has taken a personal interest in the tragic disappearance of such a bright and promising young mind,” Crowley explained with an oozing false sincerity. “And it’s an added bonus that I can check in on his investment for him.”

“President Roman invested in Tran’s work?”

That hadn’t been in the briefing, but it should have been; that added a whole new level of political bullshit. Ash had predicted governments would be interested in Kevin’s stuff, but if governments were already involved it raised the stakes significantly.

Crowley laughed, a mocking chuckle that set Dean’s teeth on edge. “Cute, but no. I meant Agent Novak, here.”

Before Dean could recover from that surprise enough to question it, Cas said, “We’ve kept you from your day long enough. Our apologies. Please carry on.”

There was no way Dean could contradict that—interfering with, or worse, detaining a presidential staffer was closer to actual suicide than career suicide, and Crowley was quick to take advantage of the opening and stroll away like nothing untoward had happened. But if Cas thought that would stop Dean from following up on that comment, he was very wrong; Dean just turned the interrogation onto him instead.

“What did he mean? Investment—are you some kind of presidential plant?” He’d suspected Cas had connections, known he had to have a privileged background, but ties to President Roman went way beyond what he’d expected. It also made Dean’s antagonistic relationship with him a lot more dangerous for Dean. People Roman didn’t like tended to meet with very unfortunate but purely coincidental ends.

“No,” Cas answered quickly, forceful but also visibly uncomfortable. “He used to work with my aunt. He was involved in some of my augmentations before he assumed the presidency.”

Dean made the connection so quickly that he felt like an idiot for missing it before. “Fuck. Novak. As in RomaNovaCorp.” As in the biggest tech company in the country, founded by Dick Roman and Naomi Novak, run solely by her after he’d taken office.

“Yes.” Cas wouldn’t meet his eyes.

Not that it really mattered, since Cas’s eyes weren’t really his eyes. Being able to see them wouldn’t give Dean any of the clues he could usually find there. Pupil dilation, signs of redness or the hint of tears, focus twitching or shaking—all basic human displays of emotion. None of which Cas and his artificial, mechanical eyes could express.

Maybe it was a good thing Cas refused to work with him as a guide, after all. Dean wasn’t even sure he’d be able to. Wasn’t sure Cas had anything left that Dean could connect with. He didn’t agree that Cas’s mods removed the need for a guide to prevent sensory overload, but they may have removed the possibility. If so much of Cas was run by wires and circuits, he might as well have tried guiding an actual computer.

Maybe if Dean let himself be torn apart and pieced back together with only half his original parts, if not less, they’d be able to give him a way to interface with whatever Cas was—because Dean wasn’t sure he was a sentinel anymore. He was sure that he wouldn’t have considered himself a guide anymore if he needed to be programmed to do it. Besides, that kind of modification was the stuff of Dean’s nightmares, especially after Sam, so it wasn’t going to happen as long as he had anything to say about it.

Just the thought made his skin crawl enough to want to forget the whole idea and the confrontation that had led to it. “Whatever. I don’t know about you, but I need food on a regular basis. Unless you have any sudden investigatory insight from your pal there, I’m gonna call it lunch time.”

Cas didn’t answer, though his shoulders tensed in Dean’s peripheral vision. The wings stayed perfectly still, as though they weren’t attached at all, but Dean had a chance to study Cas’s back as he walked over to open the gate properly and retrieve his coat. The back of his shirt had ripped open and through the flapping holes Dean could see the ends of the metal rods that formed the frame of Cas’s wings; they definitely pushed through and disappeared under his skin. There was even scarring around the points of connection, which shocked Dean almost as much as the wings themselves had. With the extensive augs covering every visible part of Cas, the work had been done impeccably. Despite his overall dislike of such significant modification, Dean had seen enough shoddy chop work to appreciate the skill and quality. The surgeries must have been clean and careful to leave Cas unmarked aside from the intentional changes.

But the wings, in addition to being the least functional mod Cas seemed to have, looked like they must have hurt going on and taken a long time to recover from. Just looking at the damage made Dean’s shoulder blades want to sink into his spine; he was absurdly grateful when Cas shrugged into the long coat and all that remained to look at was the bump they left at the center of his back. It didn’t stop him from shuddering at the memory of what he’d seen and what that implied, but he focused his attention on finding a place to eat to try and put it out of his mind.

“Hey, do you care what we get for lunch?”

Stalking wordlessly past Dean, Cas slammed himself into the passenger seat more like a petulant child than a half-robot NEI agent and didn’t answer.

Dean rolled his eyes. “Of course you don’t,” he muttered, knowing full well Cas would hear it.

Frustrated at Crowley, the situation, and each other, they grumpily went to lunch. They ended up at a novelty for Dean—a dine-in restaurant. They were all over in D.C., popular places for government officials to meet and plan and drink their states’ budgets away. Kansas had nothing like that, exactly, though pick-up windows were common and most of the major factories had public dining halls. Michigan, as with many things, was somewhere between the two.

Dean could tell that Cas was hurting again, scowling through his food and wincing at his water, but he still refused to admit it. If that was how hard the guy pushed himself every time, it was no fucking wonder he’d been dropping into partial zones. No amount of augmenting could stop that, and neither could a guide. There were limits to what a body could take, even one as tampered with as Cas’s. In fact, Dean wasn’t sure that all the mods weren’t adding more to his stress instead of alleviating it. Cas was a mess, a man-made disaster, and too proud or misguided to see how close he was to falling apart. Even though he’d told himself he would, Dean couldn’t just sit by and watch it happen. It reminded him too much of Sam and his past, irredeemable failure.

He could never make up for that, but if he didn’t stop it from happening to someone else, he wasn’t sure he could live with himself.

Sentinels evolved to stretch their senses for short periods of crisis, but Cas was always on. But yet again, Cas got angry at Dean for pointing it out and they left lunch on bad terms to return to the police barracks for an update. They’d only just made it through the doors when someone ran over, looking shaken but trying to hold it together for duty’s sake.

“You’re the guide, right?” he asked Dean. At Dean’s nod, his shoulders dropped a few inches in relief. “Our officers were involved in an incident, one of them—she’s a sentinel, she got her partner’s blood on her hands and she’s not… We don’t have any guides, we can’t help her.”

“Lead the way,” Dean ordered without a second look at Cas.

The kid was in a bad way, but not in a total zone yet. She was in the barrack’s garage, where it looked like they had dragged her out of the car after retrieval but hadn’t been willing or able to pull her any farther. Probably couldn’t without risking her hurting herself or one of them, if the way she was shaking and staring at her hands was anything to go by; she was close to snapping. She didn’t even seem to notice that they’d turned a hose on her to blast the blood from her hands and arms, but Dean knew it wouldn’t be enough to break her out of it. It definitely wouldn’t get enough of the smell off to stop it from affecting her if she was focused in on that sense.

“Cut the water,” he told the nearest person, not caring if they were involved or not. His department may not have been as well-maintained as Michigan’s, but he knew how the barracks worked. If they couldn’t do it they would get the message to someone who could or be considered negligent in their duties, and consequences for that were grave no matter where it happened. Trusting his order would be carried out by the time he reached it, he started toward the center of the commotion.

“Dean,” Cas said, voice tight, but he didn’t continue when Dean failed to acknowledge him. Good; Dean didn’t need more than one fight, and he wasn’t sure how much of one he was going to have on his hands with the sentinel in distress. Sometimes they got tetchy when someone tried to break into their freak-outs.

In that respect, it was almost easier to handle sentinels in a total zone. It was a protective measure for guides as well as sentinels, so that guides didn’t have to worry about being accidentally killed by the sentinels they were trying to help. For sentinels, overwhelmed by sensation and unable to stop the flood of input on their own, a zone snapped them from reality into the blank safety of the aesthecosm, where there was nothing to see or hear or smell. It left their bodies defenseless, but the potential for injury was a better chance than the absolute certainty of death if their heart and lungs stopped working because their brains shut down everything that wasn’t sensory processing.

Trouble was, it wasn’t always possible to bring a sentinel back from the aesthecosm. Sometimes they were too far gone, already suffering brain damage or just unwilling to return to a world that could hurt them just by existing—by making them exist in it. The perfect neutrality of the aesthecosm had too strong an appeal. Dean had barely been able to pull his brother out of it once when they were kids; hadn’t been able to talk him out of turning to drugs and the cyberscape for the same kind of escape. Although Sam had technically been killed by the brain damage, by his black market neurolink burning his synapses to ash, Dean blamed his death on sentinel overload—and on the neurolink that had allowed him to override his senses when he was connected in, finally giving him the escape he always wanted.

The officer wasn’t such a hard case, fortunately. Her zone was only partial, she was still stuck in reality. Dean was able to pull her down with minimal intervention, dialing back her senses for her until she could think enough to do it herself. She still looked dazed when she was taken away for medical treatment and a lot of cleaning; Dean felt the same.


	5. Chapter 5

Dean hadn’t been wrong to expect some sort of reaction from Cas to the incident in the barracks garage, but he was surprised at how long it took Cas to say something. It didn’t happen at the barracks: Cas had obtained a towel from someone while Dean was handling Tracy and handed it to him without comment after Tracy had been ushered away by what remained of her squad. Raw from what he’d had to do and surprised by the gesture, Dean hadn’t been able to offer more than a grunt that vaguely approximated gratitude. It had seemed to be enough. And when Dean had rubbed off as much water as he could, leaving him damp but no longer soaked, he fished the borrowed car keys from his pocket and handed them to Cas, Cas just nodded and led the way through the garage.

But when they were back at the hotel and Dean was considering a shower hot enough to scald a few less necessary layers of his skin off, Cas found his words just in time to stop Dean from shutting himself in the bathroom.

“Dean.”

Grinding his teeth, Dean paused in the doorway but didn’t turn. He didn’t need to hear whatever was going to follow, not when he was too drained to start trying to interpret Cas’s tone of voice; a chore even at the best of times, since he always sounded like he was somewhere halfway between choking on his own self-importance and swallowing a mouthful of burning gasoline. It all just came out angry. Not that Dean had yet had much chance to hear Cas talking when he could be sure the man wasn’t angry. Maybe there was more nuance there he just wasn’t aware of.

With nothing to work with but Cas abruptly grating out his name, Dean could’ve been in for a confrontation on the morning’s punch or another lecture on how much better Cas was at being a sentinel than anyone else or an admonition not to repeat the previous night’s shower activities—which he was in no mood for, anyway. Just the thought of any of that exhausted him.

“I just wanna shower and sleep, Cas. Can’t this wait?”

Cas ignored him; he should’ve known better than to expect anything else. At least he was too run down to take another swing.

“What you did,” Cas said.

Hand clenching on the doorknob, Dean braced for the follow-up.

“That was—you did a good job. It’s good that you were able to help her.”

In the silence after Cas’s awkward statement, it took Dean longer than it should have to process what exactly had just been said. It was so far from what he’d been expecting that he was initially sure he couldn’t have heard right. It was only after playing it back in his head and coming up with the same words, then giving in and turning to make the eye contact he’d been avoiding that he could confirm he’d heard correctly after all. Cas, who Dean had just dismissed as unreadable, was staring at Dean in a way he never had before—which was saying something, given how often and long he’d stared already in their two days working together. His brows were drawn together and his lips were pursed, but the lines of both were softer, curious rather than challenging.

He looked at Dean like he was something fascinating. Something worthwhile, and though Dean had told himself again and again that he didn’t care about his recalcitrant partner’s opinion of him, it nevertheless made a tiny bubble of pride and gratification float up his chest. Proving his worth to the guy who called him a glorified babysitter, the guy who accused him of being not enough; it wasn’t enough of a victory to make up for the other shit Cas said, but it still felt good.

Almost like he’d read Dean’s mind, Cas’s face turned down into a grimace and he said, “I was out of line this morning. I didn’t realize it was so…” Then he stopped, shaking off whatever he hadn’t realized with a full-body resettling that made his oil tubes flash under the artificial lighting. He recovered in the blink of an eye, so quickly that Dean almost doubted his perception again, but he thought he was finally starting to crack through the walls of Cas’s stubborn cyborg facade. He’d seen vulnerability and he chased the traces not out of cruelty but the hope that maybe he could really find a way to connect to the man.

“My own misunderstandings aside, the way I spoke to you was inappropriate. I apologize. I haven’t reported this morning’s altercation to Cesar and I don’t plan to; whether you choose to make your own statement is up to you.”

More or less on its own, Dean’s head dropped to the side to lean against the door frame and he blinked a few times. Once again, he felt too slow reacting and not just because of his exhaustion—though that certainly didn’t help. He licked his lips, watched Cas’s eyes adjust without apparently losing their focus on him. Slowly, feeling sure he was missing something, he confirmed, “Whether I want to… tell our boss that I nearly broke my hand trying and failing to punch your face in?”

The corner of Cas’s mouth twitched. He was smiling. It was a smug little smirk, like he was proud of his superior face damaging Dean’s fist, but at least he seemed to be inviting Dean to join in on the joke. When he spoke, it was in the same deadpan that Dean remembered from their first meeting when Cas had hit him with unexpected sarcasm about the chip scanners. “My augmentations require very substantial structural reinforcement. By mass, there’s more metal than organic tissue remaining in my body—though by volume, I’ve been informed I still qualify as human.”

With that, Dean remembered the vital revelation that he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten, even in the excitement of Tracy’s partial zone. “Fuck, that’s right. Wings! How do you have fucking wings?”

Cas cocked his head and raised his eyebrows, though his smile didn’t falter. “What happened to, ‘I just wanna shower and sleep, Cas.’?”

His impression of Dean was terrible, but fuck if it didn’t crack Dean up. He started laughing at the absurdity, then kept laughing because it felt good, felt like something he needed—even if it was bordering on tired hysteria. Then Cas joined in, and that had the weight of the last few days lifting off completely.

“You’re an asshole,” Dean said with no heat at all, a grin still on his lips. “Yeah, okay. I still want that, though for the record you know exactly what happened to it because it was you. You happened. So I’m doing the shower and sleep thing, but don’t think you’re getting off this easy. We are revisiting this topic in the morning, got it?”

“Got it.”

Despite his plans, not to mention their necessity, Dean only made it a few minutes into his shower. Not by choice: the hot water provided a soothing antidote to the lingering chill of the second-hand hose water he’d picked up from Tracy and the steam felt like it could seep into his pores and soften his tense, aching muscles once and for all. Relaxing into the spray, Dean filled his palm with milky, translucent soap then upended it over his hair. He’d scrubbed half his scalp when Cas knocked.

“Dean,” Cas called, loud enough to be heard over the water rushing by Dean’s ears. “We just got a message from Charlie.”

“Uh. Can it wait?”

“No. She talked to Kevin.” Muffled through the door and the shower, Cas’s voice still had enough tension that Dean’s mind started running overdrive with possibilities.

“I’ll be out in thirty seconds,” he yelled back. It probably didn’t come out very clear since he’d already ducked his head back under the spray, but Cas didn’t say anything else until Dean came out in nothing but a pair of clean boxers—at least he’d thought to bring dry clothes in with him. He pulled the rest on as Cas explained, “Kevin’s avatar logged in and talked this time. He said, uh… ‘He was here, oh shit. Tell him to come to Oregon.’ Then he disconnected before Charlie could ask him anything or trace where it was coming from.”

“‘He was here.’ Figure that’s one of us?”

Grave, Cas agreed, “It seems the most likely, but we won’t know until we’re able to talk to him. And to do that, it appears we need to go to Oregon. They’re getting the plane ready for us.”

Dean still wasn’t thrilled about flight, but at least this time Cas’s loathing wasn’t there to make things worse. He was open to actual conversation, so in an attempt to keep from losing his shit, Dean said, “I haven’t forgotten, you know. Tell me about the fucking wings.”

“I’m not sure what there is to tell. They were one of my first planned modifications, though it took several years and countless versions for Naomi to make them functional.”

“Yeah, that’s kinda the point: it’s never been done before. Everyone thinks it can’t be done. So why you and why doesn’t the world know about it?”

“There’s an ongoing dispute about ownership. Dick—President Roman—designed the first version, Naomi created and perfected them. She also…” Cas frowned, rubbed unconsciously at the back of his neck and stopped as soon as he noticed himself doing it. “She considers it one of her failures, due to the extensive number of surgeries and the damage inflicted. She’s written off the whole project, I don’t think she’ll touch them again even if they malfunction.

“She can be like that,” he said wryly, looking out the window instead of at Dean. “She’s refused to go near my mouth since that surgery failed.

That was now Dean learned that Cas couldn’t really taste anything; his taste buds were so sensitively tuned that everything just tasted like molecules—whatever that meant—because Naomi fucked up his tongue when trying to augment his non-enhanced sense of taste. Not that Cas put it that way, of course; he didn’t blame her for an “unforeseeable side-effect” that couldn’t be repaired. Undoing the modification would leave Cas unable to taste or smell at all, with no chance of restoring them. Dean was horrified—no burgers, no pie, no whiskey. Cas could eat or drink them, sure, but not appreciate it.

Dean was gearing up for another fight, less antagonistic but still important, about how unbelievably messed up that was when they were interrupted by the woman herself: Naomi had been reviewing Cas’s performance logs and alerted him that he needed to report for emergency maintenance on one of his implants. Immediately.

Weirded out that she kept tabs on him like that and increasingly concerned about what exactly she was able to log and review, Dean asked, “Does it feel like there’s anything wrong?”

“If she’s calling it an emergency, it must be.”

After getting Cesar’s approval, Cas wanted to deposit Dean in Oregon then turn around and go back to D.C. by himself, but Dean wouldn’t have it. Whatever was waiting in Oregon might very well have been a trap that they were flying right into. Not to mention he didn’t like the idea of leaving Cas alone when something was emergency-level wrong. Cas didn’t particularly like that argument, but Dean pointed out that that way they could also bring the whole team to Oregon—it just made the most sense, even if it did mean doubling the flying time for Dean. Reluctantly, Cas agreed and they turned the plane around.

The office that Dean accompanied Cas to a couple hours later was massive, and even the outside had pristine white walls and giant windows that looked like real glass. The scanner at the first front door let Cas in, but when Dean followed him into the short corridor leading to a second door and scanner, the first one locked behind them with a warning chime. After that, both doors refused to open even for Cas’s chip. They were stuck there until someone came to peer at them from inside. Several people, in fact, many of whom were armed and focused on Dean.

“Bartholomew, what is this?” Cas asked a man near the center of the crowd, who had a phone rather than a gun.

“The question is, who is this, Castiel?”

“Dean Winchester, my partner from Enforcement and Investigation. I’m here to see Naomi.”

“Of course, she’s expecting you. But your colleague isn’t cleared for access, so unfortunately we’ll need to ask you to exit the building, Agent—Williams, was it?”

It was clearly an intentional slight and Dean rolled his eyes at the pettiness of it. If they were trying to offend him, they’d have to work a whole lot harder than that to get under his skin. He had no idea who these people were, other than generic corporate lackeys; he had no plans to ever see any of them again, but neither did he care enough to actively avoid them, and he certainly didn’t give a single shit if they knew what his name was.

For some reason it really pissed Cas off, though. He strode forward until he was nose-to-nose with the glass door; his eyes reflected as bright points of focused blue. Voice grave, he said, “Agent Winchester and I are in the midst of a time-sensitive investigation. I’m here because my maintenance is urgent, but I can’t allow it to compromise our investigation or the safety of our victim.”

Even on the guy’s side as he was, Dean felt a shiver run down his spine. A bit of nerves, a bit of something else maybe. When that intensity wasn’t focused on him, it was, as Charlie said, pretty fucking badass. And he suspected it would have been even without any of the enhancements, natural or unnatural, that made Cas appear superhuman.

Eventually Dean was shown to an empty conference room to work on what he could while Cas underwent his urgent maintenance—which still hadn’t been defined clearly enough for Dean’s liking. He wished he could actually go with Cas, because he didn’t trust whatever was going on at RomaNovaCorp, but he couldn’t insist when Cas didn’t ask for him there. What he could do was get in touch with the rest of the team, so he did. He got them all on a conference call so they could go over the briefing and brainstorm about what the significance of Oregon could be while they got packed and ready for the trip.

Oregon was even more run down than Kansas, half of its residents living in old metal shipping containers stacked on top of each other, the rest in concrete block dorms. Pretty much the only government or infrastructure left was the state police, whose job was more to quarantine crime than prevent it. They historically don’t get along with outside law enforcement and were generally assumed to be corrupt. After a significant amount of such talk, Billie reminded them all that she was from Oregon State Police. But they weren’t actually wrong; she just knew some guys who were still there and might be able to ease their way in with fewer ruffled feathers.

Before she and Cesar could disconnect to go make those arrangements, Cas came to get Dean from the conference room.

Dean’s relief at Cas’s reappearance was short-lived; it shriveled and died inside him as soon as he really took in the sight. Cas had looked perfectly healthy when Naomi called him in for the supposed emergency maintenance and had been doing just fine when Dean last saw him. Even with the headaches that had concerned Dean, there hadn’t been anything that had him expecting anything drastic.

Yet Cas had a large section of freshly shaved hair near his left temple and a patch of synthskin covering the area. He acted like it was perfectly normal, asking, “Are you ready to go?”

“What the shit,” he burst out before he could stop himself. “Did you just have brain surgery?”

Cas considered the question, which was clearly not a question that should have required any consideration. “Technically,” he said, “yes. But it was very minor, nothing to concern yourself with.”

“Yeah, well, I’m concerned.” Dean stood and closed in on Cas, their faces inches away as he leaned in to inspect the damage. It wasn’t until Cas’s breath caught that he realized just how intimate it was, and how the last time he’d been so close he’d ended with punching Cas. He didn’t want to punch Cas now. He wanted—

It didn’t matter.

“In my book there’s no such thing as ‘minor’ cracking open your skull. Should you even be walking around right now?”

“Yes, Dean. I’m fine. There was no cracking of skulls necessary; I’ve had an access hatch since I was a teenager,” he assured Dean.

Dean did not feel reassured. “The fact that you don’t see anything fucked up about that is so much more fucked up, are you serious?”

“Dean.” Cesar’s reprimand was the first time Dean remembered that the rest of them were still there on the call, listening in on his argument with Cas. If he’d been hoping for backup, he was disappointed. “I realize it seems extreme, but this is normal for Castiel. We’ve all been here for adjustments before. If Naomi says he’s fine to go, then you’re both meeting us at the plane in twenty minutes. Is that clear?”

Teeth clenching, Dean turned to start arguing into the phone, but Cas laid a hand on his shoulder. It was over Dean’s shirt and jacket, but still the first friendly contact they’d had; it went a lot further to making him accept the situation, helped along by Cas repeating, only loud enough for Dean’s ears, “I really am fine, Dean. But I appreciate your concern and I’ll tell you if anything starts to feel wrong, okay?”


	6. Chapter 6

Oregon had once been known for its expansive forests—at least, that was the story. Just like the stories about guides being bountiful and sentinels rare, there was no one alive who had actually been around for it. The land Dean saw in his brief, accidental glances out the plane’s windows had no green amidst the gray and black, stone and ash. All that had burned generations ago, most of the west coast, and nothing had grown since.

Dean had been born and raised in the dusty plains of Kansas, was used to air that clung to his tongue and clumped in his lungs, but the air that filtered in when the plane door opened tasted smoky on top of the thick grittiness. Charlie shuddered as it hit her.

“That can’t be healthy,” she muttered, lifting a sleeve to cover her nose and mouth.

Dean knew from experience it wouldn’t do any good; sure enough, she lowered her hand a few seconds later with an unhappy grimace.

“Of course it isn’t,” Billie said, walking out behind them. “Why do you think everyone’s so fucking desperate to escape? Home sweet home.”

There was a car waiting for them, a boxy, beat-up thing that looked like it had been decommissioned from police use ten years ago and left to rust ever since. But it fit all six of them, with Billie at the wheel, and it ran. The noises it made weren’t entirely reassuring, but as far as Dean was concerned, it was still better than the plane: at least if the vehicle stopped working or the engine exploded or something, they were already on the ground and had a shot at surviving it. And though the car’s safety may have been questionable, especially since the pavement was so full of cracks and potholes that it felt like the chassis might rattle apart at any moment, the walls surrounding the highway looked to be much better maintained.

For the most part.

“What happened there?” Charlie asked as Billie swerved them around a pile of rubble. Hazy gray sky showed through a corresponding chunk missing from the wall above it.

Billie shrugged, unconcerned. “Something explosive, probably. Takes a lot to get through these walls. Intentional or not, it’s not an active incident or they wouldn’t have let us on the road, and they’ll get it cleaned up soon enough. Happens a lot around here.”

“Oh.”

The rest of the drive was quiet, other than the clattering of the car trying to fall apart around them. No one but Billie had been to Oregon before and the few glimpses they got of the world outside the fortified highway were sobering. Even Dean, who grew up in the poor, barren Dust Bowl, hadn’t been prepared for just how much worse it was than his home state. Kansas had roads, apartments, churches, bars; most of it was one tornado away from collapse, but they were there and citizens could move as they pleased among them.

He’d known, in the surreal, abstract way that came with things everyone knew but no one around him had experienced, that Oregon was different. Actually seeing the block housing was like looking into a whole different world. The cement and rusted metal buildings, each twice as big as the Kansas barracks and at least three times as tall, were sealed off from each other: three rows of fence between them with razor wire lines every few feet up to the top, what looked like transformer boxes around the base to electrify them. What windows there were had bars or grids, some so narrowly spaced that Dean had to wonder what, aside from people, they were trying to keep out. Or keep in.

It took a little more than an hour to reach the Oregon State Police barracks; once they got there, they had to face the fact that they weren’t sure what else to do. Kevin had said to come to Oregon and nothing else, and hadn’t logged in since. It wasn’t time for him to log in yet—it had crossed over into the next morning, but not that far yet—so they just had to wait. Dean and Cas had had a stupidly long day by then, so Cesar sent them off to get some food and sleep while the rest of the team set up in a conference room they’d commandeered.

The barracks cafeteria looked so much like Kansas’s that Dean had a moment of disorientation—even the tables were bolted down in the same angled orientation, offset from the serving windows to increase visibility. But the jumpsuit uniforms were different and he’d never had implanted coolant tubes glowing dimly in his peripheral vision when walking in for a meal back home.

The owner of those tubes didn’t share Dean’s comfort at the familiar mess hall. Then again, for him it wasn’t familiar.

“Sound carries disturbingly well in this room,” Cas said, leaning in to press his shoulder against Dean’s so Dean could hear his guarded undertone.

It didn’t feel like a secret to Dean, but he didn’t want to make Cas uncomfortable, didn’t mind the closeness. “That’s by design. Helps admin monitor what’s going on and ensures everyone can hear comm announcements. What’s disturbing about it?”

The wry look Cas shot him made something spark unexpectedly in Dean’s insides, as bright as the vibrant blue of Cas’s eyes. He tried to write it off—sleep deprivation, the stress of the case—but it just flared again when Cas said with absolute gravity, “There are so many people chewing, Dean.”

Laughing, Dean promised, “We can take whatever we get back to the room.”

“Is that allowed?” Cas looked around, no doubt noting that no one else was leaving the cafeteria with trays or even cups.

“Nah, but we’re gonna do it anyway. What do you want?”

“It doesn’t make a difference to me, it all tastes the same.”

“Like molecules, yeah.”

Dean cast Cas a sidelong look. What he was about to suggest hadn’t gone well in the past, but he and Cas were doing a lot better with each other than they had been. Cas respected Dean as a person and a teammate, Dean hadn’t hit Cas in almost twenty-four hours, and Dean knew he wasn’t mistaking the wistfulness in Cas’s voice just then. Cas hadn’t been able to enjoy food for half his life and it still bothered him.

“You know, I could probably help with that.”

He wasn’t really expecting anything to come of it; Cas had refused every one of Dean’s offers to put his guide abilities to use, and he didn’t see why it would change for something so insignificant. Then again, he realized when Cas considered it instead of grumpily dismissing the suggestion like he usually did, maybe that was why: it wasn’t something that mattered. It wasn’t something that Cas needed from him—not that Cas would ever admit to needing anything, the stubborn asshole.

Even with the stakes so low, it looked like it took everything Cas had to look Dean in the eye and ask, “How?”

Dean didn’t like seeing him so vulnerable and open in front of as many strangers as filled the hall, though not everyone was blatantly staring at them. Staring at Cas, since they’d probably never seen anyone with mods like Cas’s and they didn’t even know about the wings. “We can get into it upstairs. Come on, if we’re gonna try this then your first bite should be the best Oregon has to offer.”

There weren’t a whole lot of options for that lofty goal, but their burgers looked palatable enough for synth meat. Cas was quietly contemplative as Dean grabbed food for both of them then nodded toward the hallway. They got looks as they walked out with full plates, but they’d been getting looks the entire time; as Dean predicted, no one tried to stop them from leaving. He let Cas lead the way to their room, a standard bunk on the third floor with one bed lofted over the other and two desks across from them.

They put their meals there, though Dean ignored his burger in order to talk to Cas, who was staring at his own plate like it was suddenly going to come to life and attack him. Then he turned the exact same look on Dean. “What are you planning to do and how will it help?”

“Well,” Dean faltered, all at once uncertain of himself. “I mean, I guess I don’t know for sure if it will help, since with all your,”—he waved vaguely—“it might not work the way it usually does with sentinels. But it’s what we, what guides, do. You know? Filter stuff out, turn off your senses when you can’t.”

Cas continued to look at him, puzzled creases around his eyes, and Dean remembered Cas’s reaction to him helping Tracy from her partial zone, how he’d started and stopped himself from saying something about it. He had to ask, “What did you think guides did?” 

“I don’t know,” Cas admitted like it pained him. “I never—I don’t know.”

Not wanting to push it when they were finally talking to each other like real people, Dean just repeated his offer. “We could try it, let you see what all the fuss is. About guides and about burgers. I would have to touch you, though.”

“I’m touch-sensitive,” Cas said softly, like he was admitting some big secret rather than stating the obvious that had led Dean to add that warning.

Dean contained his exasperated mockery to a crooked smile and a quiet but not unkind, “Yeah, I kind of figured.”

“It’s extreme, even for a sentinel. Skin-to-skin contact with another person can sometimes be unbearably intense.” He looked away as he said it, bright eyes dropping down and to the side, shoulders creeping up with nerves.

“Tell me if it gets to be too much. I’ll stop as soon as you tell me to.” Dean tried to put as much reassurance in his voice as he could while desperately shoving down thoughts about what it sounded like. How he was pretty sure his visibly embarrassed partner had all but confessed to being a virgin and Dean was all but feeding him a line for his first time.

“Is there anywhere I shouldn’t touch?” Dean’s hands hovered near Cas’s neck, hesitant and more than a little uncertain. He’d never worked with a guide who had mods of any kind before, much less augs as extensive as Cas’s. There were so many tubes everywhere. Bare skin contact was the only way to make the connection, and while he was standing so close that he could tell that the skin around the ports was natural, not synth, it didn’t mean there couldn’t be something underneath it that he would disturb or that would hurt Cas.

Cas frowned at him. “I’m not going to electrocute you.”

“Is there anywhere you don’t want me to touch?” Dean clarified, feeling even more like he was negotiating something entirely different. Hopefully Cas was too busy or disinterested to notice that he was affected by it. “Anywhere that would be uncomfortable or painful or just, you know. Anywhere you don’t want.”

“Oh. No, it’s—it’s all the same, more or less. I don’t know how I’ll react until you do it.”

So Dean did; he set his palm carefully to the back of Cas’s neck, snaking it under the tubes so that it was all skin on skin, and focused on limiting Cas’s sense of taste as Cas took the first bite of his burger.

Instantly, Cas went limp, dropped his food, and fell out of his chair. He slumped into Dean on the way down, nearly taking him to the floor too—there was a lot of weight in all his mods, everything that had been put into him and onto him to sculpt him into RomaNovaCorp’s vision of perfection. But Dean managed to jerk himself clear and stay upright, which meant he had a perfect view of Cas as he crashed to the ground. Landing heavily on his side, Cas didn’t react to the fall. It was gravity and the weight of his wings that pulled him onto his back, not his own movement.

Cas’s eyes were open and bright but unfocused. They didn’t track the way Dean had initially found unsettling, constantly moving and dilating and scanning, and without that they looked empty and lifeless. He wasn’t lifeless—Dean checked his pulse four or five times to be sure—but he wasn’t there, either.

He was zoning.

It was the deepest, most abrupt total zone Dean had ever seen. Cas wasn’t reacting to his surroundings at all, didn’t so much as twitch when Dean pressed the palm of his hand to the bare skin of Cas’s throat. If even his strongest sense wasn’t reaching him, he was in trouble. Trying to limit his senses again didn’t do any good, either, because he wasn’t processing sensory input from reality anymore: he was lost in the aesthecosm. Dean couldn’t just pull him out like he had the kid in Michigan. He had to go in after him.

First, he had the presence of mind to let Cesar know what was going on. He keyed in the call on his NEI comm, then dropped it on the floor nearby. The visual part of the connection mattered a lot less than getting the rest of what he needed set up.

Cesar answered in a few seconds. “Dean?”

“Cas is in a zone,” Dean said without preamble, raising his voice to carry as he crossed to the door and set it to let in anyone from the team. “Bad one. I’m gonna try to bring him back, I need someone to come keep an eye on us in case it goes bad.”

“I’m on the way, don’t do anything—”

“Thanks boss, see you soon.”

“Dean!”

Ignoring Cesar’s continued protests, Dean turned his attention back to Cas. Though Dean’s touch hadn’t been enough to ground him, it would help Dean find him inside the aesthecosm and drag him back to reality. Muttering an apology, because he felt creepy as shit about it, he unbuttoned Cas’s shirt and wrestled it off his unresisting arms. Creepy or not, he had to stop and stare at his first—probably only—chance to really look at Cas’s wings. Unused, they just looked like metal tubes, bent in half and planted beneath the skin. If he looked closely enough, he could find the slits where the energy blades would erupt out, but they were as dormant as Cas. The scars around them—

Dean shook himself free of the distraction. Cesar and whoever he brought with him would be there soon and he couldn’t let them stop him. He wouldn’t leave Cas alone, not when it was his fault to begin with.

Stripping off his own shirt, he got into a more or less comfortable position behind Cas—he had to slouch and angle his neck to avoid crushing himself against the folded wings. When he had as much of his chest pressed to Cas’s back as he could manage and his arms wrapped around Cas’s middle, he took a last deep breath. It was almost too much, claiming that sort of intimacy when he didn’t deserve it, but he had to.

He dropped his cheek onto Cas’s shoulder, closed his eyes, and let himself feel every point of contact, every line where the warmth of Cas’s skin was interrupted by a thin plastic tube, every wrinkle of his own clothing creasing into his flesh. Then he let himself feel more.

The aesthecosm blossomed open around him as the physical sensations faded into so much white noise.

Dean had only fallen into the trance once before, when he’d been ten or eleven and Sammy was six and zoned for the first time. That had been his fault, too, careless with his spices even though he’d known Sam’s sensitivity to smell was developing rapidly. Fortunately, he’d been able to make up for his failure as a big brother and a guide by pulling Sam back from the numbness of the aesthecosm; he could only hope he would be as successful with Cas.

And that Cas—who by his own account had never met a zone he couldn’t be knocked out of with a touch, had never passed that boundary into the aesthecosm, into the protective yet dangerous silence that came with leaving the physical behind—wouldn’t be seduced by it the way Sam had.

Dean opened his eyes in the surreal way of a dream: he couldn’t be sure, once he’d done it, that his eyes hadn’t been open before. It could have been unsettling to find himself standing instead of sitting, but he let that pass, too, as not being real enough to matter. In the aesthecosm, a vast and empty metaphysical plane that only paraesthetics could reach, nothing was particularly real except for the sentinels and guides who ended up there.

The first and only time Dean had dropped into the aesthecosm, he’d found the zoned sentinel he was looking for right away. Sam had been right there next to him, both in the real world and in the aesthecosm, but Dean had also felt his presence like a tug behind his ribs.

But Cas wasn’t there. In the darkness that wasn’t really darkness, where Dean could have seen despite the lack of light if there had been anything to see, there was nothing. His chest felt empty.

“Cas?” he yelled into the echoing silence, just in case, but he couldn’t even hear his own voice. “Cas!”

Dean surfaced, heart racing in panic and all the more aware of it because he hadn’t been able to feel his heartbeat at all in the aesthecosm. It slammed into him at the same time as all the other physical sensations returning. The disconcerting shift in position, from a semblance of standing in the void to lying on his side was equally jarring, especially since he knew he’d been sitting on the floor behind Cas when he dropped, but found himself instead stretched out on the lower bed.

It was a tight fit, but at least he still had Cas pressed to his chest—for all the good that did. The sentinel thrashed in his arms, but when Dean let go and rolled him on his back to check for responsiveness, he was still spaced out. It didn’t seem like he’d been trying to get away from Dean at all; his movements didn’t stop even when Dean wasn’t clinging to him anymore.

If anything, they intensified: his legs twitched and kicked out like he was running and his arms flew up to shelter his head. Even his face twisted in what looked like terror, though his eyes stayed fixed and open and he didn’t speak at all. Dean tried one more time, grabbing Cas’s shoulders and shaking, calling out his name, but nothing changed.

“Dean!”

Cesar was there, shaking him like he was shaking Cas. When Dean looked back, he saw the whole team was there. He must’ve been under in the aesthecosm for much longer than the couple of minutes that it felt like, and they must’ve been the ones to move him and Cas. Cesar and Billie stood the closest, right by the edge of the mattress, and both of them looked a combination of worried and pissed. Though Cesar was more on one end of the spectrum and Billie the other, Dean found it remarkably reassuring, managing to settle him in a way he didn’t expect, that even the member of the team who he’d thought hated Cas the most was there and involved and concerned.

Further away, at the desks still littered with the remnants of the burgers that had started the whole thing, Charlie and Ash were buried in CS equipment and each apparently doing twelve things at once, by the way their fingers jumped around. They spoke to each other so quickly that Dean didn’t even try to make sense of the half of the words he understood.

They were all there for Cas. Maybe they were there for him, too.

“He’s not there,” he told Cesar. “I went in after him but he’s not there.”

“We know.”

“What?”

“If you’d waited half a second,” Billie cut in, her voice soft but scathing, “you would’ve known too instead of wasting everyone’s time with dramatics. Charlie got a ping in Tran’s server right before you called from a signature that matched the last time Cas connected in.”

Sitting up, Dean stared from her to Charlie to Cas and back. He said, “That’s not possible. He’s not wired in—he wasn’t anywhere near a conduit.”

“Be that as it may, it read like him,” Charlie called from her seat without looking up. “And that’s not even the only weird thing about it. The only reason I could even ID it was that I had his other log to compare it to. There was no chip registration—not even blocked, just blank, which should be an auto-reject from the cyberscape. Even I’ve never been able to get around it.”

“Lost a week and a bottle of illegally strong whiskey when I bet a guy in my symposium class I could do it,” agreed Ash.

“The avatar didn’t look like him,” Charlie said, “but I didn’t get a good look at it because he left before it even recorded. Jumped servers, not disconnected, even though there are about a thousand firewalls around Kevin’s server and it’s not even connected to a main hub. And again, even I can’t find a way off it. It’s literally impossible for Cas to have switched into the open cyberscape from there. But he did.”

Cas stayed restless under Dean’s watch, constantly in motion with nowhere to go. The hand Dean rested on his chest wasn’t really intended to accomplish anything—it was for him, not for Cas—but he made a perfunctory effort to tune into Cas’s senses. As expected, he found nothing he could do to decrease Cas’s sensitivity, not when he was in such a bad zone that he didn’t even register Dean’s touch.

“He’s definitely zoned,” Dean said as he stared at the rise and fall of his hand, the flow of fluid through the tubes all around his fingers. “He’s not in the aesthecosm, he’s in the cyberscape. He…”

All movement in the room stilled, even Ash stopping with an uncharacteristically quiet curse as he figured out where Dean was going.

“He zoned to the cyberscape.” The words felt absurd as he said them, but it was the only thing that made any kind of sense, no matter how little sense that was in the end. “He zoned into the cyberscape? That’s—how the fuck could he have done that?”

No one had an answer for him right away; the only sound in the room came from Cas thrashing on top of the blankets. Then he made a noise, small and heartbreaking, a whimper of pain or fear.

“Maybe—” Charlie said like a flinch, reactive and over-loud, cutting off too soon.

It brought Dean’s focus to her, away from his point of contact with Cas, though he didn’t break the touch. In his peripheral vision, he saw the others turning away from him and Cas toward her, too. Under their attention, she tugged nervously at a few strands of hair, mouth twisting. The departure from her usual confidence unsettled Dean, but he couldn’t hold it against her. It wasn’t like any of them knew what they were doing.

And when she did continue, there was more thoughtfulness to her voice than hesitance. “When he zoned before, it was only a partial, so he didn’t go anywhere. As far as we know, he’s never had a total zone before. But the neurolink has to be recent if none of us knew about it, and there has to be a reason he’s not dead from it yet. What if they’re related? They have to be, right?”

That, too, made as much sense as it didn’t. “Like they somehow wired the cyberscape connection into the part that should link to the aesthecosm? I didn’t think we even knew what that was yet.”

“If anyone was going to find out, my money would be on Naomi Novak and her nephew-turned–test subject,” Billie said darkly. “She’s been digging around in his brain since he was a teenager, often enough to install a fucking access port.”

“No idea,” Charlie admitted, sounding as frustrated and unhappy as Dean felt. “But my guess? It’s related to everything Naomi’s done to him. I mean, the neuro-uplink alone is—and then she was fucking with his brain today, too. The timing just adds up, and not to anything good.”

“So how do I go after him?”

Charlie fell silent, but Ash looked up from his screens—briefly, before going back to working at them while still talking. “I got a buddy not far from here, she’s working on some cyberscape tech that might be able to give you a shot. She’s got a whole immersive, biofeedback setup going. Totally experimental, but so’s, uh, all of Cas.”


	7. Chapter 7

Cas slumped against Dean in the back row of seats in the borrowed state police car, still insensate and restless. His flailing had settled some just before Dean and Cesar carried him out of the barracks, though his legs still twitched helplessly in what looked to be a regular rhythm. Most worrying, which was by then a very high threshold as far as Dean was concerned, he had also started to make noise. Only rarely, and so quietly that Cesar and Charlie in the row ahead of them didn’t react, but it wasn’t a promising sign.

Words would have been better. Even a rambling string of nonsense, dreamlike and irrelevant, might’ve given some indication that Cas had something going on in his head. Thoughts, brain function, conscious or not. But small, sad whimpers were too primal to mean anything other than Cas was in distress—nothing Dean didn’t already know.

“Does the highway go to your friend’s place or what?” Dean called up to Ash, who was up front with Billie. Then, to her, “And what would ‘or what’ entail? Are there other streets, will we have to carry him—”

“Her block’s on the highway,” Ash cut in. “Road’ll take us right there, we just need to get through the gate.”

“We’ll get through the gate.” Cesar’s statement left no room for doubt and Dean trusted that he would do whatever was necessary. They all would; the rest of the team had it handled, so Dean could leave it to them and focus on Cas.

He almost would’ve preferred it if there had been something else they needed him for, because sitting there with Cas suffering and nothing he could do to help was torture. It made him want to drop back into the aesthecosm, even knowing it was useless, even knowing Cas wasn’t there, just in case. Just to have something to do.

He settled for stroking Cas’s hair, avoiding the shaved patch, and stretching out to try soothing Cas’s senses—just in case, to have something to do.

It was a long time before they pulled up in front of the gray building that housed Pamela Barnes and her illegal, experimental underground laboratory.

Charlie took up Cas’s other side as Dean maneuvered him out of the car so that Cesar could stay behind with Billie to wave their credentials and argue with the gate officers about what they were doing there. The NEI authority was enough to get Dean, Charlie, and Ash through carrying an unconscious man with them, but not enough that the officers wanted to allow it without a bunch of paperwork.

Inside, Ash led them through cellblock-style corridors and stairways until they reached a door with a posted sign warning occupants that going through it was a crime with penalties up to and including execution. Ash pulled it open while Dean tensed for an alarm that never came. One more hallway, another door and their surroundings shifted from unlit gray to bright fluorescence, white plastics, and reflective metal.

The woman waiting for them raised her eyebrows as Charlie and Dean almost dropped Cas when he started kicking and trying to run with more energy than ever.

“I see part of your problem, honey,” she told Ash, “but I’m still not sure I understand the rest.”

Impatient and stressed, Dean answered before either of the techies had a chance. “I need to be able to connect in to the cyberscape and be a guide when I’m there. Ash thinks you might be able to do that. Can you?”

She looked from Cas’s struggles to Dean’s face and whatever she’d been about to say stayed unspoken on her lips. Instead, expression sobering, she nodded and said, “Yeah. I think I’m your best chance. Well, me and this beast over here.”

Pamela turned to the largest piece of equipment in the room, what looked like an industrial refrigerator turned on its side. When she opened it, a clear, viscous liquid glittered inside; metallic strands within added to the sparkle and the unease that filled Dean.

He eyed the tub warily. “And it does what, exactly?”

“It’s kinetic gel,” Pamela answered. Like that meant anything. “It’s like your standard motion bands on eight kinds of steroids. Captures every single movement, since you’re surrounded, and it also provides tactile feedback. You touch something in the cyberscape? You feel it on your fingertips. You sit on a hard chair or a soft couch? You can tell the difference. But what Ash said you really wanted was this.”

She knocked on the cap at the head of the tub that had a collection of wires and gauges and digital readouts protruding from it. “Realtime brain scan. I’ve put together the most comprehensive bio- and neurofeedback system the world has ever seen in this baby, and it’s even calibrated for sentinel senses. Whatever level of perception you can handle, it’ll give you. Enhanced senses in the virtual world.”

Charlie inched a few steps closer. “Does that do anything? I mean, if the cyberscape’s not designed to generate that level of detail?”

“As a matter of fact—”

“Later,” Dean growled. “You think it’ll work? Great, I’m in, set it up.”

And so Dean ended up in a vat of cool goo, display lenses inside his eyelids and tiny buds in his ears and less clothing on his body than he otherwise would’ve been willing to strip down to in front of his still-new colleagues. That didn’t matter, next to Cas.

Cas wound up in a large armchair near the tub holding Dean, still twitching and flinching every few seconds. There was no way to keep their skin contact like Dean had when trying to find him in the aesthecosm, but since that hadn’t worked anyway and he wasn’t sure it would make a difference in the cyberscape, Dean let it happen.

“Are you sure about this?” Charlie asked just before Pamela closed the lid.

Dean couldn’t see her, his eyes taped shut over the lenses, but he nodded. “I have to find him, Charlie. I can’t leave him there. Especially if he’s zoning, shit, being out in the cyberscape is the opposite of what he needs.”

They dropped Dean into the cyberscape at the nearest server hub, which was close to where Charlie had lost track of Cas’s ping. In the press of crowded avatars, bright lights, and busy noises, he worried even more about Cas and his overstimulated senses. It was a terrible environment for him to be in.

But most importantly, Dean felt that tug behind his ribs that he hadn’t found in the aesthecosm. More than a tug—it was a desperate ache in his chest, like something had hooked straight into his heart and was trying to tear free. Without stopping to think about it—without needing to think about it—Dean started moving in the direction of the pull. Slowly at first, but even as he was moving toward it the feeling grew stronger, the pain sharper, and before long he broke into a run. False forms appeared and disappeared around him, fantastical avatars of giant trees and anthropomorphized animals and whatever mess of parts was someone’s particular kink, and Dean ignored them all as his pace grew more frenzied.

At last he spotted something in the distance, slipping between gaps in the crowd, and even though he couldn’t make out the form amidst the bustle and digital neon, he felt it and just knew. He’d found Cas.

“Cas?” He said it in an undertone, softer even than a whisper, because he didn’t want to draw attention from anyone else or overwhelm Cas’s already fragile perceptions. If Cas was listening, he would hear it; if he wasn’t, no amount of shouting would help. Then Cas and Dean felt a spike of relief, even though it was confirming what he already knew.

But when he caught up, he barely recognized his partner. He knew it was Cas—felt it, could see traces of the man he knew—but instead of the grown body so heavily modded that Dean hadn’t even known if he was human when they met, Cas was a child. His avatar presented itself as a kid, maybe six or seven years old, without a single augmentation that Dean could see.

His eyes were wide and terrified and wet; they were also a deep, natural, human blue. Cas stared up at him with those eyes, and they looked unnatural in spite of their lack of augmentation. Just regular human eyes, in a young boy’s face no less, but they pierced through to Dean’s soul more unnervingly than the implants ever had.

If Cas had zoned to the aesthecosm, he really would’ve been able to see Dean’s soul; at least, that was the prevailing belief. When sentinels and guides dropped into the aesthecosm, their bodies stayed in reality—so the metaphysical projections that appeared, that they could use to find each other, those had to be something else. Dean didn’t know if he believed it. After going in after Sam, he’d tried to think about the aesthecosm as little as possible.

But he at least almost believed it, and that was enough to plant twin seeds of sorrow and worry in his chest as he wondered what he would’ve seen if he’d found Cas there. His own appearance hadn’t been on his mind either of the times he’d visited the aesthecosm, but Sam had looked more or less like himself as far as Dean remembered.

Cas had zoned straight into the cyberscape, no conduit, no traceable connection. Did that mean he was looking at Cas’s soul? He was so vulnerable, small and scared, and Dean’s nerves clenched on panic because he had no idea how to bring Cas back from it.

“Hey, Cas,” he said, still quietly. There weren’t many avatars around them, and no one seemed to care enough to pay attention to what looked like a panicked child being approached by a grown man in what could easily be a faked NEI uniform. It was the cyberscape, after all, and few people were who they appeared to be. Dean was, and Cas—he thought maybe Cas was, too, at that moment. “You had me worried.”

“Dean?” Cas’s unfamiliarly high-pitched voice trembled, a plaintive tremor in his tone that never would have made it through if he’d been in full control of himself. That worried Dean, but he told himself it was a good sign that Cas was functioning enough to recognize him. To talk to him.

“Yeah.”

“Why are we here?”

Every second, every word was like a homing dart biolocked onto his heart. “Well, uh. You zoned and it brought you here. And I’m here to bring you back, so are you ready to try and get out of here?”

Talking to Cas like the kid he appeared to be was weirding Dean out, though he didn’t know if talking to him like an adult would’ve been any less awkward. Especially since Cas’s only response to his childproofed explanation was to frown and keep looking up at him with that lost little boy expression.

Dean licked his lips and looked around. The crowds made him nervous. “How about we go somewhere safer and quieter?” If he could get Cas back to Kevin’s server, he’d at least feel better about having to figure out the rest of it.

He held out his hand and Cas took it without hesitation.

Like a blink, their surroundings shifted and Dean took a disoriented second to look around. Cas had brought them to a plain bedroom, furnished only with a modestly sized bed, a desk, and a bookshelf. No decorations, no personal touches, even the blankets were a pleasant but bland forest green. He was pretty sure he knew what that room was, and that hurt, too. For all that Dean’s childhood bedroom had been tiny and rundown and shared with his brother, at least it had felt like a home.

“This your room?”

Cas nodded and didn’t let go of his hand.

It wasn’t as ideal as the other server would’ve been—Dean had no idea where they were hosted and didn’t think Charlie would be able to find them there—but a considerable improvement over the hub regardless. If Cas felt safe, it was worth the trade.

They were still holding hands, so Dean led Cas to the bed and they sat on the edge together.

“Cas,” Dean started, but the words stuck in his throat. Feeling as lost as Cas gave him nothing to work with, but he had to do something. He was the one who knew what was going on, the one in control of his mind and senses. Maybe that was the answer: he’d come in prepared to guide a sentinel out of a zone and been thrown by finding Cas the way he was, but that didn’t need to change things.

“What are you hearing right now?” he asked.

Fortunately, Cas took the question seriously. He frowned, closing his eyes—Dean had no idea if it did any good, but in theory cutting off a source of sensory input was a step in the right direction—and stayed quiet for several breaths. Without opening his eyes again, he said, “Voices. Talking about us, they—I know them?”

It was a painfully tentative question. Dean nodded, then remembered Cas wasn’t looking. He knew that was a good thing, but it was hard to find his voice to say, “Yeah. It’s our team. Our friends, who are worried about you. We’re in a room with them right now, out in reality, and they’re trying to figure out how to help us.”

Cas’s frown deepened and his eyes opened, fixed on Dean. “How come I don’t hear you? I hear you, but I don’t hear you the same as them.”

“Because I’m in here with you. This isn’t… you know this isn’t real, right Cas? We’re in the cyberscape. You know what that is?”

Cas rattled off a definition that was probably more accurate than anything Dean could’ve come up with, then looked surprised at himself for having done so. It was another good sign, but more than that it was an expression that reminded Dean of the real Cas—adult, augmented, grumpy Cas—and he missed the man suddenly and fiercely.

“Stop listening,” he instructed gently. Tentatively, he extended his own senses into Cas’s. To his incredible relief it worked; Pamela hadn’t been wrong about her tech’s capabilities. “Make yourself stop hearing everything but my voice here, okay?”

“How?”

“Just focus on me, okay? I’m gonna keep talking to help you out, and I want you to just think really hard about only listening to me until you can’t hear any of the rest of them. Can you do that?”

It took—he had no idea how long, but slowly Cas settled. Even better, Dean could feel Cas’s hearing soften inside his mind, used Cas’s focus on that to gently nudge down his sensitivity to touch and sight, too. As Cas regained the composure that Dean knew from him, he also grew before Dean’s eyes. From childhood to adolescence, then a breathtakingly beautiful man who aged to almost match Dean’s partner. Except Cas stayed unmodified throughout: no optic implants, no tubes, no wings.

When it was done, he looked at Dean like he had never seen him the same before, either. “You saved me.”

Cas reached out, closing his hand around Dean’s arm like he was trying to see if he was real, though his other hand was still closed in Dean’s. It should have been ridiculous, given that neither of them were actually real, as such—they were just projections in the cyberscape, digital avatars of themselves. Not real, not physical, not present. But Dean felt it. He felt Cas’s fingers gripping him tight just like he would’ve in reality. He stared down at it and Cas followed his gaze.

“You can feel that?”

“Yeah. I’m in this kinetic suspension stuff, a whole vat of it back in Oregon. Ash’s buddy has been working on it, I wasn’t sure if it would work.”

“You shouldn’t have done that. What if it didn’t, what if it hurt you—”

“I’d do it anyway. We’re a team, right?”

Cas tried to turn away, but Dean stopped him with a hand on his cheek, forcing Cas to look at him.

“You’re worth it,” he insisted. “I’m not doing this because we got stuck working together, okay? I care about you.”

Cas’s tense posture melted, at the words or the touch or both. Dean remembered how he’d responded to the simple contact before, like he was starved for it, and leaned in even closer to offer what comfort he could.

“I’m here for you, Cas,” he repeated. Then, to try and ease away from the fragility of the moment, he asked, “You can feel things here too?”

“Everything.” Cas nodded, his cheek moving in Dean’s palm but not pulling away. “I’m—it’s all connected, with the neurolink. My muscles, my bones, my skin, it’s all so wired in that I don’t know what’s mine and what’s theirs anymore.”

“It’s all yours. Your body, your mind. You.”

Dean wanted to show him. He wanted, needed to show him with kisses that Cas could feel, because they were to his body: his cheek, his lips, his neck. With hands that traced over his skin, light and firm, soft and hard, letting him feel the difference and see what he liked. With their bodies coming together, a bond that was real and personal no matter where it took place.

Looking at Cas’s cheek still pressed into his hand, he thought maybe he could. He moved slowly, tentatively at first to make sure it was okay; leaned in an inch at a time, eyes on Cas’s, until he was close enough to kiss.

“This okay?” he asked there, hesitating before he closed the last of the distance. But when Cas hesitated, too, he said, “That’s fine, it’s okay, you don’t have to,” and started pulling back.

Cas jerked forward to push their lips together, too awkward and rushed at the start but so achingly desperate that Dean didn’t mind the way their noses and teeth bumped together. He just guided Cas gently into place, kissed him softly but endlessly until they were gasping into each other. Dizzy when he finally broke for air—felt like he shouldn’t have had to, when he hazily remembered they were in the cyberscape, but he must have been forgetting to breathe in reality, too—Dean tipped his forehead in to rest against Cas’s.

“How are you doing?” he whispered into the close space between them. “Is this still okay? Not too much?”

Cas’s eyes opened slowly from where they’d fallen closed; for a brief instant, Dean thought he saw the blue glow of his implants burning brightly, but the next second it was gone. “Not too much. Not—I’ve never—I could never touch anyone, Dean. Could never let anyone touch me. But I look at you and I want to, have wanted to.”

Only another round of kissing, started and led by Cas, stopped the flow of words. Then he drew back, looked at Dean with a shy determination, and asked, “What if it’s not too much because it’s not enough?”

So Dean showed him that, too.

Cas shook as he rocked in Dean’s lap, shuddered every time Dean brushed his collar bone with a kiss, moaned—softly at first, then gradually louder—as his body tensed closer to climax with each roll of Dean’s hips. For all that it was happening in the cyberscape, it was the most intense and pleasurable sexual experience of Dean’s life; the only, in Cas’s.

Whether because of that or because Dean was getting biofeedback in a suspension gel through his clothing and Cas’s nerves were wired directly in, Cas came before Dean was close enough for anything to come of it. That was fine, because Cas’s orgasm was the success Dean needed; the proof that whatever had been done to his body, he still lived in it and it could be good to him.

He pulled out tenderly, jerked himself off with Cas’s body pressed against him as he whispered praise and love into Cas’s skin. Then he held Cas, undone on the virtual projection of his heartless childhood bed, until the tears stopped and he knew they couldn’t delay any longer.

“You ready to come back with me?”

Shaky, but nowhere near as unsteady as his child-avatar had been, Cas nodded. Dean pressed one last steadying kiss to his lips, then they disconnected together.

Someone had to help Dean out of the gel, help him remove the lenses from his taped eyes and wipe off his face. In the time that took, he’d already become aware of the tense silence in the room as well as the unfortunate and obvious situation in his boxers. Still, the first thing he did when he had the use of his eyes back was seek out Cas. He was staring back at Dean, eyes bright and mechanical but so much more expressive than Dean had ever given them credit for before.

“Well,” Charlie said after the quiet dragged out for too long. “Uh, congrats and also please never do that again when I’m in the room. Cas, good to have you back.”

A round of equally awkward greetings followed, then Cesar suggested they head back to D.C. to regroup and try to fix whatever Naomi messed with inside Cas’s brain before he zoned again.

Cas shook his head. “I know how to get back. I can control the implant, now that I know how it works, and if I link in that way again I can find Kevin Tran. Let’s finish this now.”


	8. Chapter 8

Dean and Cas went back in together, starting at the crowded hub before Cas took his hand and jumped them to a new server.

The avatar waiting there—wherever it was Cas had taken them, it wasn’t the server they’d met Channing in—looked just like the pictures of Kevin Tran; he wasn’t hiding himself behind any of the more fantastically unrealistic forms that were so popular. And though he did seem to be waiting, it clearly wasn’t for them, because when Dean and Cas appeared in front of him uninvited he swore up a startled storm.

“Why are you here?” he concluded, then jerked his head between them again and added, “How are you here?”

Since he was presumably on a standard conduit connection rather than the strange and unusual methods Dean and Cas were linked in on, his hands flailed with data from his wrist bands and his head turned as his glasses moved, but his facial features remained static in the way characters in the cyberscape usually did. It was the norm for cyberscape avatars, but even the brief time Dean had spent with Cas after his zone had somehow accustomed him to expecting more expression.

Cas had been extremely expressive, after all. But it wasn’t a great time or place to return to those memories—or to wonder how those expressions would be different in the real world. He’d promised Charlie, after all. So he set that aside and answered, “Trying to find you. And hey, look at that, we did. So what’s up with the disappearing act?”

“You can’t be here!” Kevin sounded panicked. “You can’t. You have to go, you can’t be here when—”

It was too late. A plume of red smoke floated into existence, a non-human avatar that said, “Well, this is an unexpected turn, isn’t it?”

Dean frowned; the voice was familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Cas could: “Crowley?”

“Yes, hello again. I’d say I was sorry for lying to your faces but, well, we all know that would be a lie.” The smoke drifted closer to Cas with a thoughtful noise. “Well, you look to be in better shape than I was expecting.”

Stepping between him and Cas, Dean demanded, “What’s that supposed to mean? And what the fuck are you doing here?”

Crowley admitted to being the one who had helped Kevin pull his vanishing act; he’d been looking for a way to double-cross President Roman and when he discovered Kevin had stumbled across something he shouldn’t have, he saw his opportunity.

Kevin started to explain. “So, you know how sentinel and guide traits aren’t hereditary? And people have been trying to track down where they come from since before gene sequencing? Well, someone did figure it out, and the only thing worse than what they’re planning to do with it is how they proved themselves right.”

Dean kept glaring between the two of them, not sure what else to do. “And how do you know any of this?”

“Well, I was doing some testing with my encryption code—nothing malicious, just playing around with security, and I stumbled into the server where they’d stored all their data. It was—”

“Just show them,” Crowley interrupted, impatient.

“But you said—”

“There’s an update. A new recording that Castiel really ought to see.”

“If you’re sure.”

Kevin still sounded hesitant, but he walked to one of the blank, computer-generated walls and with a few waves of his arm that probably translated to a lot of typing in reality, he made a door appear where there had been nothing before. Then he stepped back and turned to Cas. “This is what I found.”

Cas went through; Dean followed. Within the other server they found hundreds of videos of Naomi operating and running tests on Cas, most of which he didn’t remember. The most recent, the update Crowley had mentioned, was the surgery from that day. Rather than the emergency maintenance she had claimed, she narrated her way through installing inhibitors that she hoped would stop Cas from continuing to get distracted by Dean. Given the areas she messed with, Dean was finally able to let go of his lingering guilt: that, not his burger or his touch or trying to ground Cas’s senses, was the culprit of Cas’s zone.

Though he was furious, his violent thoughts had to take a back seat as more of Naomi’s misdeeds came to light. She wasn’t only manipulating and trying to control Cas; she was working together with her former business partner and current president Dick Roman to turn a whole generation into sentinel-cyborgs who could be used as super soldiers, super cops, and so on. Oregon was ground zero for their testing, then for implementing the terrible conditions and hormone changes—they’d even drugged the water—needed to raise the rate of sentinel births.

Once they’d learned all this, Kevin told them that after a lot of freaking out and talking to people he could trust and more freaking out, he’d decided to shut down the cyberscape, for good, and take every last piece of research with it. Society would recover and they could crumble RomaNovaCorp’s power. But he needed Cas to help him. Which Cas did, jumping server to server to locked down, firewalled server to send them crumbling. Every step of the way Dean was with him, keeping him focused and grounded, making sure he wasn’t too overwhelmed by the flood of information rushing through him.

They didn’t stay to watch the fireworks after that. The team gave them knowing looks and sent them back to their room while they helped deal with a toppling government. Dean and Cas had done their part and what they needed was time together to sort out what was going on between them. The revolution had others to turn to.

In their bed away from the world, they hashed out all their remaining insecurities. Cas worried that Dean wouldn’t like his physical body with its cybernetic parts; Dean worried that he’d taken advantage of Cas when he was vulnerable after his zone and there wasn’t really anything there. They were both wrong.

Cas kept closing his eyes and shying away every time Dean’s hand brushed one of his oil or coolant tubes, pressing his back against the mattress even though it must have been uncomfortable for his wings.

“Cas, baby.” Just like he had in the cyberscape, Dean set his palm to Cas’s cheek and made him look up. “Don’t hide from me. I’m not scared of any of it, I’m not disgusted. I told you, it’s all you, and I want all of you. I’m giving you everything I am here, Cas. Trust me enough to do the same?”

With that, Cas fell apart into him, so sensitive to every touch that Dean had to pull back every so often, reach in and guide his senses just a little lower a little more often to keep him from zoning over all the sensations. He didn’t mind; Cas was beautiful and responsive, and once he’d settled into it and stopped being quite so overwhelmed he even turned it around and took charge for a while. He had to map Dean with his fingers and his eyes, lick him all over now that he had his sense of taste back—it might not have been enhanced, but he still seemed obsessed with the way different parts of Dean tasted.

All the different parts, because after he realized he didn’t have to be scared or ashamed, Cas was just as intense and determined in pleasuring Dean as he had been in everything else. Dean was licked and sucked and bitten, and he had to fight a bit to be able to return the favor—Cas, with his cybernetically backed muscles, let him win that fight but only for a little while before getting single-minded about his own explorations. Dean let him have that, because it was all new to Cas and he wanted him to feel good about it, to feel confident and in control.

Cas very nearly lost that control when he sank into Dean, his wings unfolding and flaring to life unconsciously, but there was no damage done save for their shared surprise. When Cas started concentrating to close them away again, Dean gripped Cas’s jaw in his palm and gasped, “Leave it. If you can—just leave it and fuck me, Cas, please.”

He had to slit his eyes against the light and regretted not seeing Cas’s face as he came, but he knew they’d have plenty of opportunities to try it again, try everything again and everything they hadn’t done, for the rest of their lives.


End file.
